SOA Tech Magazine

Very large portion of the world’s business critical systems are considered to be ‘legacy’ –and so is the code underpinning them (ie COBOL, PASCAL, C, to name a few).   Although in many cases it is the case that these systems are robust, stable and fit for the main purpose they were originally built, they aren’t flexible and scalable enough to support emerging requirements mainly derived from a more demanding ‘always on the move’ and ‘always connected’ user. These systems struggle to meet these demands mainly because of the ‘monolithic’ approach on which they were built and the complexity hidden in millions of lines of code that is only understood a very few hand-full of people that still remain active from the teams that several years ago developed these systems. In almost an equal amount there have also been thousands of failed attempts to modernise these legacy systems. The ‘eating the elephant’ in one go approach certainly didn’t work, and the traditional SOA approach a...

There is no doubt that web [Rest] APIs have become extremely popular and its usage has gone well beyond just building APIs in support of mobile apps. We can see the adoption of  resource-oriented architectures (ROA)  by probably all SaaS vendors who provide out-of-the-box APIs as the means to connect and interact with their cloud applications. Take for example the Oracle Cloud . To discover and consume publicly available Oracle SaaS APIs, all one need to do is browse the  Oracle API Catalog Cloud Service  (which is publicly accessible) and just select the  Swagger definition for any given API. But (as you probably already know) the adoption of web APIs hasn't stopped there.  With the increased popularity of Microservice Architectures  , initiatives such as  Open Legacy  ,  and node.js based frameworks like loopback and sails (to name a few), API-enabling system of records is becoming a lot easier. This is putting a lot of pres...

Digital transformation is at the core of every business strategy regardless of what type of business an organisation is in. Companies that embark on a on a digital transformation journey are able to create innovative and disruptive solutions that are capable of delivering a much richer, unified and personalised user experience, at a lower cost. They are able to engage the customer in a seamless fashion through many channels such as mobile apps, responsive websites and social media. Organisations that adopt innovative digital business models gain considerable competitive advantage over those that don’t. The fundamental driver for digital transformation is the ability to unlock key information assets and business functionality, which is often hidden inside an organisation’s enterprise systems and in SOA based web services which are only internally accessible. To materialise these assets, organisations need to build web based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that not only pro...

During the OFM Summer Camp for Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) it was all going very smooth. In fact too good!! until I had to set up MAF 2.1.2 in JDevleoper and configure the utility provided in the lab (maf-mcs-utility-2.1.3.1.4). At this point nothing worked…The fact that I use Mac didn’t make things easier either as most people were on Windows and the lab sort of assumed the same….. So after at least 6 hours banging my head against the wall I finally found a solution. Word of Caution I initially tried to make this work in an existing Jdeveloper 12.1.3 soaquickstart installation. I tried to set up MAF 2.1.2 in this environment (following the docs steps) and it got to the point that I was getting all sort of weird errors (many related to MDS not loading and others around compilation). So at this point I decided to do a full clean install of everything (including Java). Below the steps: Preparation: Uninstall JDK 1.8 or JRE 1.8 (if you don’t have a JDK installed yet) b...

In this article I will talk about my first conclusions and my point of view regarding Microservice Architectures. As there is still quite a lot of confusion and debate out there on this topic, I will try to describe with my own words what Microservice Architecture is, how does it differ from typical Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and what design principles and practices governs it. What is a Microservice Architecture? In the article  http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html  written by Fowler and Lewis, Microservice Architecture is described as following:: Microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms , often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services ,...

Oracle has recently released Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) 12c and Oracle API Catalog (OAC) 12c .I am particularly exited on the latter as it aims to simplify management of APIs and promises to be able to create catalog of your services and APIs rapidly. Furthermore, although OER 12c maintains the same richness as in OER 11g, this product is targeted to advance users that are in need to address more complex governance requirements whereas OAC it’s a light-weight version of OER however tailored to address specific use cases of API management such as cataloguing, discovering and rating APIs. This blog is about my first impression when installing, configuring and using Oracle API Catalog. In the blog I provide all steps I followed to achieve these tasks and at the end I provide a summary of my experience and feedback of the product. Installation Pre-requisites Download Weblogic Server 12.1.3 and OER 12.1.3 software binaries from following link (note that OAC uses same OER inst...