Book Image

Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide

By : Antony Reynolds, Matt Wright
Book Image

Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide

By: Antony Reynolds, Matt Wright

Overview of this book

<p>We are moving towards a standards-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), where IT infrastructure is continuously adapted to keep up with the pace of business change. Oracle is at the forefront of this vision, with the Oracle SOA Suite providing the most comprehensive, proven, and integrated tool kit for building SOA based applications.<br /><br />Developers and Architects using the Oracle SOA Suite, whether working on integration projects, building composite applications, or specializing in implementations of Oracle Applications, need a hands-on guide on how best to harness and apply this technology. <br /><br />This book will guide you on using and applying the Oracle SOA Suite to solve real-world problems, enabling you to quickly learn and master the technology and its applications.<br /><br />The initial section of the book is aimed at providing you with a detailed hands-on tutorial to each of the core components that make up the Oracle SOA Suite; namely the Oracle Service Bus, BPEL Process Manager, Human Workflow, Business Rules, and Business Activity Monitoring. Once you are familiar with the various pieces of the SOA Suite and what they do, the next question will typically be: "What is the best way to combine / use all of these different components to implement a real-world SOA solution?"<br /><br />Answering this question is the goal of the next section. Using a working example of an online auction site (oBay), it leads you through key SOA design considerations in implementing a robust solution that is designed for change. Though the examples in the book are based on Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.4 the book will still be extremely useful for anyone using 11g.<br /><br />The final section addresses non-functional considerations and covers the packaging, deployment, and testing of SOA applications; it then details how to use Web Service Manager to secure and administer SOA applications.</p>
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the authors
About the reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 7. Using Business Rules to Define Decision Points

At run time there may be many potential paths through a BPEL process, controlled by conditional statements such as switch or while activities. Typically the business rules that govern which path to take at any given point are written as XPath expressions embedded within the appropriate activity.

Although this in an acceptable approach, we often find that while the process itself may be relatively static, the business rules embedded within the activities may change on a more frequent basis. This will require us to update the BPEL process and redeploy it even though the process flow itself hasn't changed.

In addition, by embedding the rule directly within the decision point, we often end up having to re-implement the same rule every time it is used, either within the same process or across multiple processes. Apart from being inefficient, this can lead to inconsistent implementations of the rules as well as requiring us to update the...