From Traditional Integration to Composition – Enterprise Business Services - Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform - page 239

From Message Broker to Service Broker
Again, we will look at the CTU business case started in the previous chapter. While the
Brazilian CIO was busy re-engineering and implementing order fulfillment in a Pan-Amer-
ican way, urgent needs for a lightweight service broker for mobile OSS/BSS operations
were expressed in the Chile regional office.
A new project named Extended Data Interchange ( XDI ) was started independently. Ini-
tial requirements were to cover message brokering between ERP (Oracle EBS R11) and
mobile/network equipment providers, routing purchase orders to different suppliers. Direct
communication was impossible for the following two reasons:
• OeBS R11 was able to post messages as SOAP 1.1, where most of the suppliers re-
quired SOAP 1.2.
• Supplier endpoint maintenance was considered impractical in the core ERP and the
need for a middleware layer was expressed. The solution had to be compact
enough to be moved out from the production to the communication zone or even to
the DMZ. Basic security features were implemented in the new broker.
From the very beginning, this solution was considered as temporary, as more mature enter-
prise products were expected. However, nothing is more permanent than temporary. Migra-
tion from R11 to R12 with the SOAP 1.2 support has been considerably delayed; full-
fledged ESBs were prohibited by the headquarter until completion of the pilot SOA project
in Brazil. We are sure that you must be familiar with such situations.
What have we got as an architect here?
• We have local developers familiar with JEE.
• We managed to negotiate the Canonical Protocol for all parties as HTTP. That
greatly simplifies our life as we will deal with only one synchronous protocol, with
simple operations and no SOAP conversions. If SOAP 1.2 is required, we will
wrap our message in the required envelope.
• We realize that this broker will be temporary anyway, but all EBO/EBM structures,
transformations, routing slips are related to the core business, and will stay. There-
fore, the solution must be highly modular, ensuring easy migration or coexistence
with solutions to come.
• Obviously, MB must be a very reliable and a good performer.