SOA Gateway for Oracle E-Business Suite

Finally, Oracle has come up with the solution for Oracle E-Business Suite in line with their product strategy. "Integrated SOA Gateway" is part of Oracle EBS 12.1.1, which enables EBS customers with a robust SOA based Integration infrastructure to consume and deliver services natively

This module comes loaded with functionality that is need for integrations using service oriented architecture. So far, customer had to rely on building custom components and features in Fusion Middleware to integrate or to expose EBS transactions as web services.

Features of SOA Gateway

1. Integration Repository: This has been traditionally a repository of all integration points available in EBS, as an collection of all API's( and Interface tables). Now this module got a face lift or make over, certainly in right direction. Following are the features of integration repository

• Service Enablement UI: As the name says, its the front end for generating and deploying web services.
• Business Events in repository: This has been good feature that is gaining popularity among developers/designers from past few years. Now, you should be able see all the events from repository.
• Composite Services: This feature allows to build composite services utilizing the natively available services in E-Business suite.
• Business Service Objects: This provides the methods for accessing and operating on standard business service objects and standard set of guidelines and implementation instructions for developing services.

2. SOA Provider : This consists two components that allow SOA enablement of Oracle E-Business Suite during run time and design time.

• Service generator exposes integration interface from integration repository, while service deployer deploys the web service

3. Service Invocation Framework: Oracle E-Business Suite now provides the Service Invocation Framework (SIF). SIF from within Oracle E-Business Suite is enabled though Oracle Workflow Java Business Event System and is based on the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) support from Oracle Application Server.

4. SOA Monitor : Traditionally this is one feature that oracle ignores to provide a tool/feature and customers end up developing a custom solution. This is "FIRST" monitoring solution that is available part of Oracle E-Business suite. Thanks to Oracle for recognizing the need after ...well 2 decades of ebusiness suite in development.

For me this looks like a glorified XML Gateway module with addition to all the above features. Certainly this is the right direction and will analyze the solution in our labs for an in depth evaluation.