Oracle SOA Suite 12c Features
Oracle introduced SOA Suite 12c with several new features and enhancements aimed at improving development productivity, application design, debugging, reuse, integration, and administration.
Below are some of the key features introduced in Oracle SOA Suite 12c.
1. Single Installer
Oracle SOA Suite 12c provides a single installer for developers, simplifying the installation and setup process. The required components, including SOA Suite, WebLogic Server, and the development database, can be configured through the unified installation process.
For development environments, SOA Suite 12c uses the Java Derby database, which is file-based and lightweight, making it convenient for local development and testing.
2. Single IDE
Oracle SOA Suite 12c provides JDeveloper as a unified IDE for SOA and Service Bus development.
In previous versions, Service Bus development commonly involved a separate Eclipse-based development environment. With SOA Suite 12c, OSB/Service Bus applications can also be developed directly within JDeveloper, providing a common development experience.
3. Debugger and Refactoring
SOA Suite 12c introduces enhanced debugging and refactoring capabilities for SOA and Service Bus applications.
The debugger allows developers to identify and troubleshoot issues during development before deploying the application. This helps reduce development and testing effort.
The refactoring capabilities also make it easier to modify and reorganize application components while maintaining their dependencies.
4. Dependency Explorer
The Dependency Explorer provides a visual representation of dependencies between different SOA composites and Service Bus projects.
Large integration applications can contain many artifacts and relationships, making dependencies difficult to track manually. Dependency Explorer helps developers visualize these relationships and understand how different artifacts are connected.
5. Graphical MDS
SOA Suite 12c provides a graphical interface for working with Metadata Services (MDS).
Through the graphical MDS functionality, developers can publish, search, and consume reusable artifacts from MDS and Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER).
6. SOA Templates
SOA Suite 12c introduces templates that promote code and component reuse across development teams.
Templates help reduce development effort by allowing commonly used functionality to be reused instead of developed repeatedly.
The three major types of templates are:
Project Template
Component Template
Custom Activity Template
7. BPEL Sub-process
SOA Suite 12c introduces BPEL Sub-processes, which help reduce redundancy and improve the reusability of BPEL logic.
For example, if a database table needs to be updated multiple times within the same BPEL process, instead of creating separate database invocation logic each time, the common logic can be implemented as a sub-process and reused wherever required.
There are two types of BPEL sub-processes:
Standalone Sub-process
Inline Sub-process
8. Re-sequencing in Service Bus
Re-sequencing functionality was available in the Mediator in earlier versions. In SOA Suite 12c, this capability was also introduced for Oracle Service Bus.
It allows incoming messages to be processed in the required sequence, even when messages arrive out of order.
9. New Adapters
SOA Suite 12c introduces and enhances several adapters to support additional integration scenarios.
Examples include:
Coherence Adapter
LDAP Adapter
Cloud Adapter
REST Adapter
UMS Adapter
MFT Adapter
MSMQ Adapter
SAP R/3 Adapter
These adapters make it easier to connect SOA applications with different enterprise and cloud systems.
10. XQuery Mapper
SOA Suite 12c introduces the XQuery Mapper, providing XQuery-based transformation capabilities.
It can be used when XQuery is more suitable than traditional XSLT-based transformations, particularly for complex data transformation scenarios.
11. Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS)
Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS) provides an out-of-the-box scheduling mechanism.
It can be used to schedule and execute services or integration processes based on configured schedules.
12. Translate Activity
SOA Suite 12c introduces the Translate Activity, which can be used to transform data between native formats and XML.
It is particularly useful when working with native file formats that need to be converted to XML for processing within an integration flow, or converted from XML back to a native format.
13. MDS Support for Service Bus
In SOA Suite 11g, MDS support was limited compared with the capabilities available in SOA Suite 12c.
SOA Suite 12c provides MDS support for Oracle Service Bus, allowing reusable artifacts such as schemas, WSDLs, and other resources to be maintained and shared through MDS.
14. File-Based MDS
In addition to the runtime Metadata Services Repository, SOA Suite 12c introduces a file-based SOA Design-Time MDS Repository.
This repository is used during development and can typically be associated with a version control system, making it easier for development teams to manage and share reusable artifacts.
15. Encryption and Decryption of Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
SOA Suite 12c provides capabilities to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from being displayed in clear text in administrative consoles.
For example, sensitive information such as:
Social Security Numbers
Credit Card Numbers
can be protected.
Specific fields in a message can be encrypted when entering the SOA composite through the service binding component and decrypted when leaving the application through the reference binding component.
This capability is available for services and adapters in both SOA composites and Service Bus.
The PII policy is attached to the SCA composite, while the credentials and encryption configuration are maintained in WebLogic Server using the Credential Store Framework (CSF).
16. Splitting Proxy from Pipeline
In SOA Suite 12c, Oracle Service Bus introduces a separation between the Proxy Service and Pipeline.
The Proxy Service and Pipeline are treated as separate entities, which provides greater flexibility in designing Service Bus applications.
One important benefit is that multiple Proxy Services can be connected to a single Pipeline, allowing common processing logic to be reused.
17. Enterprise Manager Instead of SBConsole
With the integration of Service Bus development into JDeveloper, the traditional Service Bus Console (SBConsole) functionality has been moved into Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM).
Enterprise Manager provides many of the administrative and monitoring capabilities required for managing Service Bus applications.
18. Fault Policy Editor
SOA Suite 12c provides an enhanced Fault Policy Editor for designing and managing fault-handling policies.
The editor provides capabilities such as:
Designing and editing fault policies.
Creating fault policies using a graphical editor.
Defining alerts, actions, and property sets.
Configuring default actions for invoking a web service or enqueueing data to JMS.
Sending alerts through JMS, email, or log files.
Associating alerts with actions based on the required fault-handling scenario.
Fault policies can also be associated with different levels using the Composite Binding configuration, including:
Composite
Component
Reference Binding
Service Binding
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