Posts Tagged ‘AIA Foundation Pack’


AIA Foundation Pack Business Objects

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

This post is more technical and will drill down into the various Enterprise artifacts that come with the Foundation Pack.

The first are the Enterprise Business Objects (EBO). There are about 30 of these in v2.01 but new ones will be added in subsequent releases. EBO’s are define for Customer, Supplier, Invoice and other common business artifacts.

Each EBO contains all of the attributes necessary to describe the particular object. As mentioned previously Oracle has researched multiple applications to come up with just about every attribute possible for a best-of-breed capability. These attributes are described in XML using an XML Schema Definition (XSD) file.

Using EBO’s provides several clear benefits:

EBO’s eliminate Point to Point Duplication- P2P works when connecting two systems but requires a complete re-implementation when you introduce a second service provider / requester

EBO’s support a One to Many Model – For Integrations that map one service request to many service providers (or vice versa), EBOs allow re-use of initial implementation and reduces overall number of transformation maps to generate

EBO’s are Hot Pluggable- Common Objects abstracts application service providers from service requesters and centralizes routing and mediation which allows any application to plug into the integrated process flow

EBO’s provide standards based content to drive interoperability- EBOs are based on the Open Applications Group content known as OAGIS and have been extended to incorporate best-of-breed attributes.

But what if you need something that is not in the provided EBO for Supplier, as an example?

AIA provides a construct for customizing the EBO which will survive future upgrades.

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AIA – The Foundation Pack Revealed

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

The Foundation Pack provides a foundation for those wanting to start building their own custom integrations. There have been a number of challenges for organizations wanting to use SOA. These challenges according to InforWorld, include:

  • 1. Lack of Architectural Blueprint
  • 2. Inconsistent Business Semantics
  • 3. Lack of standardized Business Service Definitions
  • 4. Ensuring Compliance and Mitigating Risks
  • 5. Doing More with Less

Introducing SOA into your IT environment can be a huge problem if there aren’t guidelines on how it should be done. That is what Oracle is trying to do by releasing the Foundation Pack.

The Foundation Pack provides answers to most of the challenges above. It includes:

  • 1. A reference architecture that accelerates the move to SOA at a reduced cost/risk.
  • 2. Design patterns
  • 3. SOA Portfolio
  • 4. SOA Governance
  • 5. SOA Management Policies.

Bottomline, the Foundation Pack is great for jumpstarting custom SOA-based process integrations.

So.. what do you get with Foundation Pack? Here’s a nice Oracle graphic that helps.

First, you get a Reference Model to guide your development. This gives you the benefit of Oracle’s expertise in developing their own Process Integration Packs (PIP’s).

Second, you get a set of Enterprise Business Objects (EBO). The EBO’s include object definitions for customers, suppliers, inventory items, invoices, purchase orders, etc… These EBO’s included a set of data elements that Oracle has derived by examining best-of breed applications, both their own and even SAP.

Third, you get a set of Enterprise Business Services (EBS) to handle integrations.

Fourth, you get a set of Enterprise Business Messages (EBM) already defined.

Fifth, you get standard interaction patterns for managing synchronous and asynchronous message handling between Services.

Sixth, you get an Error Handling and Logging framework for your integrations.

Seventh, you get the initial version of the Composite Application Validation System (CAVS) which provides automated unit-testing capability for objects, messages and Services.

Eighth, you get a Diagnostics Framework.

Ninth, you get a Business Service Repository tool.

Tenth, you get a nice installer package to set it up with.

Additional value that Oracle has added is the ability to manage versioning and a standard way to add customizations so that future upgrades/release don’t impact existing implementations.

They also provide documentation and guidelines based on their experiences which are very helpful.

To summarize, the Foundation Pack includes the basic tools to build integrations using the Fusion Middleware SOA Suite and provides the guidelines for doing it right.


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Applications Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack Updated

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • 1 Comment »

Oracle announced today that a new release of the AIA Foundation Pack is available. Release 2.01 works with Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.3.

If you are wondering what the Foundation Pack is I’ll be providing more information in some following posts since I just returned from some training. At a high level, the Foundation Pack provides a methodology and framework for developing integration links between applications using Oracle SOA capabilities such as BPEL, XML, and the Enterprise Service Bus.

One of the headaches for early adopters of SOA has been the governance issues. The Foundation Pack provides a structure for using SOA and a number of pre-built framework components to simplify the process.

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