Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Business to Business - B2B
Although we can use adapters to talk to remote systems, we often need additional
features to support external services, either as clients or providers. For example,
we may need to verify that there is contract in place before accepting or sending
messages to a partner. Management of agreements or contracts is a key additional
piece of functionality that is provided by Oracle B2B. B2B can be thought of as
a special kind of adapter that, in addition to support for B2B protocols such as
EDIFACT/ANSI X12 or RosettaNet, also supports agreement management.
Agreement management allows control over the partners and interfaces used
at any given point in time. We will not cover B2B in this topic as the B2B space
is a little at the edge of most SOA deployments.
Complex Event Processing - CEP
As our services execute, we will often generate events. These events can be
monitored and processed using the complex event processor. The difference between
event and message processing is that messages generally require some action on
their own with little or minimal additional context. Events, on the other hand, often
require us to monitor several of them to spot and respond to trends. For example, we
may treat a stock sale as a message when we need to record it and reconcile it with
the accounting system. We may also want to treat the stock sale as an event in which
we wish to monitor the overall market movements in a single stock or in related
stocks to decide whether we should buy or sell. The complex event processor allows
us to do time-based and series-based analysis of data. We will not talk about CEP in
this topic as it is a complex part of the SOA Suite that requires a complementary but
different approach to the other SOA components.
Event delivery network
Even the loose-coupling provided by a Service Bus is not always enough. We often
wish to just publish events and let any interested parties be notified of the event. A
new feature of SOA Suite 11
g
is the event delivery network, which allows events to
be published without the publisher being aware of the target or targets. Subscribers
can request to be notified of particular events, filtering them based on event domain,
event type, and event content. We cover the event delivery network in
Chapter 8
,
Using Business Events
.
SOA Suite architecture
We will now examine how Oracle SOA Suite provides the services
identified previously.
