What is Oracle Service Bus and How Can You Use It?

Today we are going to talk about a very powerful product from Oracle, the Oracle Service Bus (OSB). It enables economical system integration with the common standards most enterprises use. If you are an IT leader or Architect with one or more systems that need to work together, Oracle Service Bus might be right for you.

What is the Oracle Service Bus?

The Oracle Service Bus (OSB) is an architecture based on the Enterprise Service Bus. When you’re looking for options in your corporation to communicate between applications OSB presents many advantages. Depending on your business criteria, OSB has quite a few benefits. By clustering your OSB domain you give it high availability, which is a big deal for a lot of our customers.

What can it do for you?

OSB provides message delivery based on standards including SOAP, HTTP and Java Messaging Service (JMS). It provides a great way for enterprise Information Technology departments to foster communication. OSB is designed from the start to act as a mediation, integration and interface layer. By allowing communication over popular protocols such as SOAP and Rest, it talks to almost every system out there. Many companies have used OSB to let the legacy systems communicate with new systems. It can bridge the gap with older systems such as a mainframe and allow them to remain in service.

What are its key capabilities?

A key capability of Oracle Service Bus is enabling system agility. By supporting many popular standards OSB can offer your IT department flexibility in choosing it’s strategies. Oracle also knows how to design systems that are scalable and the Oracle Service Bus is no exception, it is a scalable and reliable option. When you need to setup a new service, Oracle Service Bus will facilitate rapid service enablement. The OSB supports open standards that help integrate with other vendors.

What are OSB’s key components?

OSB has a proxy service that contains the message processing logic for handling the request and optional response message. It also provides an interface that the service consumer calls. There is a business service that wraps the external systems the OSB calls which can reduce the headaches of implementation for your development team. Service virtualization allows your team to create additional agility by replacing direct coupling and providing a virtual endpoint for the consumer. This also enables other benefits such as supporting different messaging formats, service versioning and security.

What are some of the great uses for OSB?

OSB’s Message Transformation capability allows for different message formats for inbound and outbound messages. With the use of XQuery or XSLT you can quickly and efficiently transform messages. With a Conditional Branch or a Routing Table you can easily route a message to one or another external service. You can even pass criteria through headers if difficult decisions are involved. OSB’s Dynamic Routing makes it possible to route a message to a service that is not known at the time of development. OSB is fault tolerant and can handle system interruptions if Service-Pooling is configured. The system can be setup to retry as many times as you want and wait for specified time.

OSB has many capabilities that are a great fit for many organizations and I hope you found the information useful to your IT needs.  Zirous has implemented solutions using OSB for many of our clients. Comment below if your company needs support with enterprise IT decisions. Our experienced staff can help you determine what you need to take your company to the next level!