Andrej Koelewijn

Lucas Jellema has posted an interesting item on the Amis blog: Eating your own dogfood – use of Oracle Development tools within the Oracle Applications development group. It describes how Oracle is using it’s own tools to implement the Oracle Applications business suite. Some interesting statements are made in this article:

• Oracle doesn’t use Designer to generate Forms.


• Developers are now as productive developing Java (bc4j/uix) applications as they are developing Forms applications.


• All existing Forms modules are going to be converted to Java.

Lucas Jellema is reporting about the BPEL presentation at the Oracle Open World in Amsterdam today. I had also planned to attend it, but i was too busy this week: implementing a business process for a project using the Oracle BPEL process manager. Oracle’s BPEL Designer makes it look easy to create a bpel process, but you need quite some knowledge to use it: web services, xml, xml schema, using multiple namespaces in one xml document, wsdl, wsif, xpath, java, j2ee, ejb’s, ldap, jsp’s…

It’s good to hear that the bpel designer plugin for JDeveloper has already reached beta status, as running 2 IDE’s (Eclipse & JDeveloper) is a bit too much for my laptop.

During modelling the designer verifies the endpoints you define using wsdl files. It displays an error when the endpoints aren’t available. This means that it’s probably not very usefull for analysts who are designing a business process. It would be nice if you could convert UML Activity Diagrams to BPEL processes in JDeveloper. This would allow analysts to use the Activity diagrams to model the business process, which could then be converted to BPEL processes by developers.

Lucas also mentions WSIF, saying that he doesn’t exactly know what it is. His summary is pretty good though. WSIF allows you to invoke non web services as if they were web services. In BPEL when you want to use a web service you have to specify it as an endpoint by providing the wsdl file which describes the services. Oracle BPEL process manager invokes these web services through it’s web service libraries. Using apache wsif you can provide wsdl files for non web services such as EJB and Message queues. Embedded in the wsdl file are wsif tags which describe how to invoke the service. Oracle BPEL process manager will invoke these services not by using it’s web service libraries but by using the Apache wsif library.

So all the developer has to do is to write a wsdl file containing wsif tags describing the service and it can be used as an endpoint in the bpel process.

One important part currently lacking in Oracle BPEL is security. A bpel process is a web service in itself, and often you will want to restrict access to the web service. When creating web services in JDeveloper you can control access by specifying security constraints in the web.xml file. This is not possible for BPEL processes. Oracle is working on this. Integration with JAAS is expected in the next release in october, integration with Oracle single sign on is expected at the end of this year.

Oracle BPEL Process Manager uses Apache WSIF to enable you to call non web services as part of your BPEL process. This, for example, allows you to easily invoke EJB’s. I couldn’t locate any documentation describing how to use WSIF with Oracle BPEL. At first, i was looking for a tool to generate a WSIF WSDL file for an existing EJB, but i don’t think it currently exists. Looks like you have to manually create a wsdl file with wsif tags, which you can use when you add a new partner link in the BPEL designer. The easiest way to do this is by copying one of the existing wsdl/wsif files from the examples (look under samples/tutorials/702.Bindings).

I got the following error while running a bpel process:

BPEL Fault: {http://nl/iteye/service/Service.wsdl}
org.apache.wsif.soap.fault{org.apache.wsif.soap.fault.object=No Deserializer found to deserialize a 'http://nl/iteye/service/Service.wsdl:msg' using encoding style 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'. [java.lang.IllegalArgumentException]}

You may run into this problem when calling a web service running in a default oc4j version 10.0.3 or 9.0.4 from the bpel process manager.

Edwin Khodabakchian offered some quick help: Adding xsi type to SOAP messages.

I’ll be attending the Oracle OpenWorld in Amsterdam next week, but i’m having a hard time deciding which sessions to attend. Looks like i won’t have to go to the first day, as it’s all Oracle Applications related.
I’ll probably go to: “DB-1145 – Oracle Identity Management: Security, identity and trust”, and to “DB-1050 – Business process management & service oriented architecture for the adaptive enterprise”. I’ll hope to learn a bit more about BPEL and oracle’s security strategy for BPEL (ws-security).
Any suggestions for some advanced Jdeveloper, Application Server or Oracle Wireless sessions?

I ordered Jdeveloper 10g Handbook about 2 months ago, and yesterday amazon finally shipped it. I wish they has shipped it earlier, as i’ve been working on an ADF project for the last 2 months. Although i doubt it would have been very helpfull. It’s probably similar to Jdeveloper 9i handbook, which is a good book for basic jdeveloper/bc4j stuff, but it doesn’t help a lot with more advanced issues. Well, we’ll see…