This book guides the reader through a tutorial 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, thus helping the reader to find the best way to combine or use all of these different components to implement a real-world SOA solution.

Developers will learn to build implementation-agnostic services using the Oracle Service Bus. They will be shown how to assemble services in order to build composite services and long-running business process. The readers will be taught how to use business rules to externalize “decision points” in a BPEL process, and will be able to incorporate Human Workflow into their processes to provide greater agility.

This book will help users secure and administer SOA applications using Web Service Manager, and will teach them to observe the protocols available in addition to SOAP over HTTP for invoking Web Services. Readers will also learn to design their Web Service contracts for interoperability and maintainability, thus building new business services.

Technical architects and developers working with SOA will find this book useful. This book is out now and is available from Packt. For more information, please visit http://www.packtpub.com/developers-guide-for-oracle-soa- …

Newgen OmniFlow Version 8.0 is the next-generation BPM product, which comes with greater flexibility and agility, and enhanced features to address the dynamically changing process requirements of the companies across industries.

OmniFlow 8.0 is Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) compliant. BPMN is an industry-standard notation, using which users can design business processes easily and in an understandable format. BPEL is an interoperable integration model, which facilitates the expansion of automated process integration in both the intra-corporate and business-to-business spaces. OmniFlow 8.0 becoming BPEL compliant will help easy integration with other applications through Web services.

OmniFlow 8.0 includes a new component called Business Activity Monitor (BAM). It allows monitoring and reporting for business objects. The new version also includes a simulation tool, OmniFlow Simulator, which will provide better process visualization and help in forecasting and fine-tuning of a process before moving it to production.

The new version is designed with the support of maker/checker concept in Queue Management, which helps in secure environments like banks where the queue maker creates queues and the checker authorizes the maker’s work.

Speaking on the launch of the new version Diwakar Nigam, Managing Director said “Omniflow 8.0 will enable our clients to leverage seamless Business Process integration capabilities across all channels and underlying systems. The latest version enables organizations to effectively manage people, processes and transactions to achieve operational excellence.”

The new version supports more data types and is also able to accommodate user-defined, complex data types. The Audit trail feature has been enhanced to provide simplified view of data and reports.

About Newgen Software

Newgen Software Technologies Limited is the market leader in (http://www.newgensoft.com) Business Process Management (BPM) and Document Management System (http://www.newgensoft.com/DMS.asp) (DMS), with a global footprint of about 700 installations in over 30 countries.

Newgen is recognized by distinguished analyst firm IDC in its exclusive report “Newgen Software: Global Leader in Business Process Management and Document Management Solutions.”  With HSBC and SAP investment, Newgen is one of the rare product companies to have backing of both leading financial and technology companies of the world.

Winner of prestigious awards, such as CNBC-TV18 “Emerging India Award 2008”, Frost and Sullivan’s “Market Leadership Award for Document Management System and Workflow Software & Services” and “Distinguished Application Product Company” by NASSCOM, Newgen Software is an ISO 9001:2000, ISO 27001 certified and CMM Level 4 company

This move had been prompted by a white paper, produced jointly by IBM and SAP in 2005, which recognised that the existing enabling technology, called Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), was unable to deliver the human interaction requirements of the relationship. The new specification is an extension of BPEL – known as BPEL4People.

Commenting on this development, David Chassels, CEO of Procession, the developer of people/ task driven and goal directed software, said: “This is a step in the right direction but the core design of BPEL does not reflect well how people interact and how processes work in real life.”

In Chassels’ view, BPEL4People recognises that business process management (BPM) is a ‘production line’ for service delivery but that service is driven by human interaction and, at certain points, possibilities exist for such eventualities as:
•   End users’ personal preferences on how to achieve the goal
•   The multi-branching and asynchronous capability of the business process, with both tributaries and distributaries to and from the process
•   Errors and exceptions arising at unknown points in the process

”According to convention, whatever their people do in their work should adhere to some rules and, today, proof that these rules are adhered to,” Chassels continued. ”The integrity of that data needs to be maintained although it is created in an unstructured arena.

“These may seem like conflicting requirements but, if software is to truly support business, this apparent conflict needs to be addressed,” Chassels added.

“The other major issue is to close the divide between ‘business’ and ‘IT’. The BPEL4People specification does little to give comfort in this respect.

“I believe that a complete rethink is required,” he said. “Trying to adapt old technology-driven thinking will just not deliver.

“This idea has driven Procession to pioneer focusing on putting people first and removing technology complexity to allow the business to regain control over its people and processes.

“It has taken over ten years R&D and working with early adopters to produce the key to how to achieve the seemingly impossible,” he revealed. “This has helped us to recognise that there are few task types that can handle any eventuality in business.

“By separating business logic from technology driven delivery mechanisms – the internet being the latest – we can deliver on all the required attributes as described. We build applications using a graphical interface that does not require an interpretation language such as BPEL or the compilation of code.

“There are a number of core design principles that have allowed us to achieve our objectives,” Chassels explained. “These include being data centric; developing a dynamically created user form recognising people roles task and data; having flexible linking capability that also allows time and rules to be recognised, and producing a simple intuitive graphical designer that allows business professionals to control the building of an application from ‘end to end’.

“Procession represents a challenging alternative to the mindset of the established giants of our industry,” claimed Chassels, “although Microsoft now appears to be following the core design philosophy and trying to patent it in the US.  This could be a real ‘David and Goliath’ confrontation!”

When Utilized within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services are part of a business process determining the logical order of service activities – logical units of work performed by one or more services.

Today, the most popular tool for organizing service activities into business processes is Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), a language defining an execution format for business processes operating on Web Services. While it is not a trivial task to define a business process definition with WS-BPEL from scratch, using a graphical WS-BPEL tool can significantly simplify this process.

Examples and practice are much more valuable than theory when it comes to building applications using specific development tools. Unlike many other books on SOA in the market, this book is not focused on architecture. Instead, through numerous examples, it discusses practical aspects of SOA and WS-BPEL development, showing you how to apply architecture in practice with the help of PHP, ActiveBPEL open-source engine, and ActiveBPEL Designer – powerful development tools available for free.

With the help of many examples, the book explains how to build Web Services with PHP, combine them into SOAs with WS-BPEL, and then deploy composite WS-BPEL-based solutions to the ActiveBPEL engine. The examples in this book are presented in a way that anyone can understand and apply.

This book is suitable for anyone who wants to start building SOA applications using powerful tools available free of charge. It will also be useful for PHP developers willing to move towards Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Readers need only a basic knowledge of SOA, BPEL, and Web Services; even a total beginner will be able to follow the examples, provided the required software components are installed on his or her computer. More experienced readers might use this book as a reference, focusing only on the chapters of interest.

Enhancements Aimed at Increasing Developer Productivity

• In addition to the core Oracle WebLogic Server plug-in, Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Release 11g adds new features including:
  • The ability for Eclipse developers to configure, develop and test JAX-WS and JAXB services in Java and experience improved EJB3 and XML integration;
  • Tools that make it easy for developers to work with relational data in Java, including Oracle Database tools and an ORM Workbench for the Java Persistence API (JPA). With the ORM Workbench, developers can easily generate and edit JPA entities, annotate existing classes, work with relationships and map datatypes. The ORM Workbench also supports EclipseLink, in addition to other JPA providers;
  • Spring IDE Project and Spring code generation wizards, allow developers to easily work with Spring Beans and generate Spring DAO from existing JPA entities;
  • Editors and Wizards for common WebLogic Server descriptors, help to decrease the amount of time developers spend looking up documentation and making configuration changes;
  • Support for multiple versions of Oracle WebLogic Server (8.1, 9.x, 10.x); and,
  • Continued support for Kodo/OpenJPA applications.
• A Strategic Developer and Eclipse Foundation Board Member, Oracle has a long-standing history of active participation in the Eclipse community. Oracle currently leads several Eclipse-based projects including:
  • JavaServer Faces (JSF) Tools;
  • Dali Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) Tooling;
  • BPEL Tools;
  • Eclipse Data Tools Platform; and
  • Eclipse Persistence Services (EclipseLink)

Supporting Quotes

• “With Oracle Fusion Middleware, developers building rich enterprise applications have a broad choice of tools – from Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse to Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF – all designed to allow them to leverage their current skill set for the utmost productivity,” said Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president, Tools and Middleware, Oracle. “Along with providing one of the largest global developer communities, the Oracle Technology Network, Oracle offers an abundant source of tools and knowledge to make a developer’s job easier.”
• “It is great to see Oracle expanding on its Eclipse tools strategy and further contributing to the community,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse foundation. “The Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g release provides a nice complement to the work they are doing in the Web Tools Platform Projects, which includes the Dali project, the JSF tools project, the Java EE tools project, and the EclipseLink project.”

Supporting Resources

• Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse
• Oracle and Eclipse
• Oracle and Open Source
• Download Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.
• Oracle Developer Tools blog
• Java Persistence blog
• Greg Stachnick’s blog

About Oracle

Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) is the world’s largest business software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.