In this chapter, we addressed the concepts and terminology surrounding Oracle Integration Cloud Service and standards such as. XML, XSLT and XQuery used by ICS. With ICS we can create integration between cloud services and between cloud and on-premises applications. An integration consists of one trigger and one invoke called connections, and it can call multiple enrichment services. Between the trigger, enrichment services, and invoke, ICS uses XSLT mappings to transform the message structure.

We looked at the ideas and terminology around how ICS connects to the applications it can integrate with. ICS comes with a large set of out-of-the-box Cloud adapters to connect to these applications, and in upcoming chapters we will explore these connections in depth.

Integrations use the created connections to connect to our applications. Integrations define how information is shared between these applications, for example, exposed operation, message structure, and so on. We discussed the four types of integrations ICS supports and its advantages and disadvantages.

When integrating applications and/or services we can't escape the fact that messages need to be transformed, because they don't talk the same language (that is, message structure or even data types, for example, milliseconds from epoch versus date time). ICS uses the open standard XSLT for manipulating data. We discussed the language and its structure. Besides transforming the data we sometimes need to convert values (that is, domain value mapping). ICS supports lookups that we can use to convert a value provided by the source to a format the target understands.

In the next chapter, we will explain the steps to create a basic integration between two cloud services based on an SOAP and a REST interface.