Oracle SOA Suite Training: Day 3

Day 3 – on to the bulk of ESB and SOA, specifically:

* adapters
* data transformation services
* exception handling

Now we’re on to the bulk of ESB and SOA. I’m thoroughly impressed with JDeveloper at this stage. While the tool has a few quirks and is not the most defect-free of its time – it is a super powerful tool that does some really neat things.

Today we examined a few of the built-in adapters that Oracle provides out of the box with the SOA Suite. I was impressed, there are a quite a few that I can see being used pretty regularly: file, database and copybook were the ones that jumped out at me. Of course they had a vast amount of adapters for the Oracle Applications suite but we didn’t play with them because of the isolated training environment.

We used JDev to build some quick and nesting data transformation which was pretty cool. I could have used that a few months back. We took the input from some flat files and mapped it to inputs in the process which was used to drive decisions further down the process road. Neat stuff…

As far as exception handling goes, we watched more of a lab demonstration vs. talking about why, where and what to do with them. Not much additional on that topic, wasn’t covered all that well.

The ESB product is pretty cool, you can set up notifications for dropped messages, etc. pretty neat stuff. Plus, its integrated with JDev real well, you can build an ESB projects seamlessly in JDev and build/deploy in no time. Great stuff… Now, if I could just test all of this without using Oracle Application Server I’d be a super happy camper.