Oracle SOA Design and

Development Best Practices

The following lists the major sections and describes the organization of the document:

 SOA Design Approach: provides a context and design guidelines for using SOA Suite
12c
 Monitoring: provides BAM integration recommendations
 Governance: provides some general information regarding Oracle Enterprise
Repository (OER)
 Configuration Management: provides configuration management recommendations
 Continuous Integration & Deployment: provides a high level overview about some
recommended practices surrounding CI/CD practices
 Security: provides a few high-level security recommendations although this subject
is covered in another Oracle Consulting document (referenced in that section)
 Testing: provides testing recommendations mostly centered around SOA Suite 12c
 Performance: provides detailed performance tuning recommendations mostly
centered around SOA Suite 12c
 Appendix: contains the following background information that is referenced in the
main section of this document including the following topics:
o Basic Message Exchange Patterns (MEP)
o Coherence
o Metadata Service (MDS)
o Sample Common Request and Response Headers
 References: contains helpful resources including links to SOA Suite 12c
documentation and recommended Oracle University training

Most of the document’s best practices and recommendations are located in tables that have
titles that end with “Recommendations” (click on the links within the List of Tables section
for quick access to these tables). Finally, this document assumes the reader is fairly familiar
with Oracle SOA Suite 12c so very little background material is given.

Co
nfi
de
nti
al –
Ora
cle
Int
ern
al
 1. SOA Design Approach
The types of applications and systems that are required to be integrated along with the type
of integration needed by the business should drive the design of the Oracle FMW integration
layer. Oracle FMW offers a wide range of products to address the various integration needs
of a project where some of these product offerings have some functional overlap.

This section provides a context for using SOA Suite with the following goals:

 to understand at a high-level many of the other major Oracle FMW products to help
verify that SOA Suite is the right product selection
 to provide guidelines around designing and developing interfaces using SOA Suite,
which include design approach, coding standards and conventions (nomenclature),
and exception handling

1.1. Is SOA Suite 12c the correct choice?

This question may seem odd but selecting the correct products for the project’s integration
needs will help simplify the development of the new interfaces. Two other popular choices
among Oracle’s FMW offerings for implementing integration business logic are Oracle
Service Bus 12c (OSB) and Oracle Business Process Management Suite 12c (BPM). There is
clear overlap between OSB 12c, BPM Suite 12c, and SOA Suite 12c. Even within SOA Suite
12c, there are two key product components to perform integration business logic called
BPEL Process Manager (referred to as simply BPEL in this document) and Mediator that have
functional overlap.

For example, all three products BPM, OSB, and SOA can easily handle short running
processes that implement synchronous and one-way asynchronous MEP whereas OSB is
typically not a good choice for long running processes or two-way asynchronous MEPs. Even
though all three products can handle short running processes, this does not imply that each
product should be used interchangeably, since “sweet spots” exists for each product.

Error: Reference source not found provides high-level guidance on how to determine the
correct FMW product to use:

Co
nfi
de
nti
al –
Ora
cle
Int
ern
al
 TABLE 1: SOA SUITE 12C ADAPTERS SUMMARY

Note: This table below mentions only a small set of application adapters available on SOA 12c and is provided to
demonstrate the wide range of SOA suite capabilities. Readers interested in a full set of adapters are encouraged
to refer Oracle Middleware Suite documentation link:
https://docs.oracle.com/en/middleware/soa-suite/integration-adapters/12.2.1.4/develop-soa-adapters/
index.html

Adapter Name Summary

Advanced Queuing (AQ) Used to integrate with Oracle’s AQ messaging product that is
Adapter similar to IBM’s Websphere MQ.
B2B Used to integrate Oracle’s B2B engine, which is used to
communicate with external trading partners using traditional
mechanisms such as sFTP with standard based message formats
such as EDI, XML and text files.
BAM Adapter Used to send data from SOA composites to the BAM server using
either the pre-built Java RMI or SOAP interfaces. The BAM
adapter provides a direct method to send data in real-time to the
BAM server and is also easy to configure.
Database Adapter Used to integrate with just about any relational database on the
market including the Oracle Database with support for
 consuming data by polling database tables or views for
new or updated data
 direct manipulation of data via CRUD operations of
insert (create), select (read), update, and delete
 executing database stored procedures and custom SQL
Event Delivery Network Used to implement asynchronous patterns that are similar to JMS
(EDN) and has the following characteristics:
 Provides a publish and subscribe mechanism using the
declarative language called EDL (Event Definition
Language), which is analogous to WSDL
 Supports publish and subscribe (fan-out patterns), as
well as simple single consumer queue patterns
 Allows both BPEL and Mediator components to publish
and subscribe to EDN events
 Requires less administrative work than JMS since the
EDN storage mechanism is provided out-of-the-box
 Provides less control on how the EDN is managed as
compared to JMS, since JMS must be manually
configured

Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) Used to integrate EJBs via Java’s remote method invocation (RMI)
Service to support custom Java code implemented with this
programming paradigm
File Adapter Used to integrate files from any SOA Suite engine accessible
local or shared file system (e.g., NFS)
FTP Adapter Used to integrate with just about any FTP (File Transfer Protocol),
FTPS (FTP over SSL), and sFTP (Secure FTP) servers to read and
write files from any remote directory on that FTP server’s
accessible file system
HTTP Adapter Used to integrate with non-SOAP-based web services over HTTP
including representational state transfer (REST) architectural
style, with support for XML payloads and schemas. (Note: Read
about REST adapter below)
REST Adapter REST adapter follows complete implementation of REST
architectural style and support more verbs and JSON/XML based
service contracts. (Note: HTTP adapter continues to be available
in 12c, though the usage has been superseded by REST adapter.
Use REST adapter for more sophisticated implementation of Http
Co
services)
nfi Java Message Service (JMS) Used to integrate with just about any compliant JMS provider on
de Adapter the market, including the Oracle’s WebLogic Server’s internal
JMS provider where the JMS’s storage is located either in a file
nti system or a database
al – MQ Adapter Used to integrate with IBM’s messaging system called IBM MQ
Ora product, which is also called MQSeries and Websphere MQ, and

cle
Int
ern
al
 Adapter Name Summary
is similar to Oracle’s AQ messaging product
Oracle Applications E- Used to integrate with Oracle EBS applications only, providing
Business Suite (EBS) open interfaces and stored procedures for inserting data into
Adapter various EBS modules: it is important to note that other Oracle
enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft and Siebel have
similar adapters, which are licensed separately and do not come
out-of-the-box with SOA Suite
UMS Adapter Used to send and receive emails (SMTP, IMAP, POP), text
messages (SMS) and other similar notifications: this capability
was elevated from BPEL PM component level (i.e., the
Notification Service activity) to the composite level where the
UMS adapter now supports initiating a SOA composite on arrival
of an email or other.
SOAP Adapter Used to integrate with SOAP-based web service over HTTP/s.
Originally available in SOA 11g as “Web service adapter”, but
with significant improvement.
Cloud Adapter Oracle SOA 12c provides native connection for specific cloud-
based ERP/CRM applications, such as Salesforce, NetSuite and
Oracle Fusion cloud. At design time, a UI based wizard will
provide the catalogue of available business objects and events
available with adapted application to configure WSDL based
events/business objects that can be transacted at the run-time.
(Note: not all cloud adapters are pre-packaged with SOA suite,
many of these are licensed separately)
MFT Adapter An adapter to integrate Managed File Transfer module within
SOA suite 12c is now being made available. When used within
SCA composite applications, the adapter exposes a file reference
from MFT application for inbound processing, and binds to an
end-point reference from MFT for outbound processing. Like all
other adapters, MFT adapter generates it's own abstract WSDL
that can be used in conjunction with other technologies, like Java
binding.
Coherence Adapter Allows coherence cache-based operations including read, write
and update.
Socket Adapter Allows BPEL, Mediator and OSB to read/write data over TCP/IP
sockets (bound to a specific port). This is a low-level data
transport and not preferred over other application adapters. It
also works only in non-clustered environments.
LDAP Adapter LDAP servers are used to store users, groups, roles, and other
details in active directory application. LDAP adapter is used
within SOA to provide a bidirectional interface and to integrate
with other objects within LDAP application

1.2. SOA Suite 12c Composite Design

Co
nfi
de
nti
al –
Ora
cle
Int
ern
al