Oracle Service Bus allows you to manage Web services and deliver authentic
message brokering through the configuration of proxy services in the Oracle Service
Bus design-time environment. The underlying concepts of Oracle Service Bus are
briefly described in this section. Oracle Service Bus manages the routing and
transformation of messages in an enterprise system to promote seamless application
integration. The following diagram illustrates key functional components of Oracle
Service Bus.
Proxy Services and Business Services
Oracle Service Bus provides intelligent message brokering between business services
(such as enterprise services and databases) and service clients (such as
presentation applications or other business services) through proxy services that you
can configure using Oracle Service Bus development and run-time tooling. Proxy
services are Oracle Service Bus definitions of intermediary Web services that Oracle
Service Bus implements locally on Oracle WebLogic Server. With Oracle Service Bus
message brokering, service clients exchange messages with an intermediary proxy
service rather than working directly with a business service.
Oracle Service Bus lets you implement proxy services independently and configure
them dynamically, as driven by your business needs, without requiring costly
infrastructure development and re-deployment efforts. The configuration functions
are separated from the management functions in Oracle Service Bus.
A proxy service can route messages to multiple business services; you can choose to
configure a proxy service with an interface that is independent of the business
services with which the proxy service communicates. In such cases, you can
configure a proxy service message flow definition to route a message to the
appropriate business service and map the message data into the format required by
the business service interface.
Business services are Oracle Service Bus definitions of the enterprise services that
exchange messages during business processes. A business service and its interface
can be defined and configured using the Oracle Service Bus design-time tooling. To
configure a business service, you must specify its interface, the type of transport it
uses, its security requirements, and other characteristics.
A business service definition is similar to that of a proxy service, but it does not have
pipelines (a message flow).
What is a Message Flow?
In Oracle Service Bus, a message flow is the implementation of a proxy service. You
configure the logic for the manipulation of messages using proxy service message
flow definitions. This logic includes such activities as transformation, publishing, and
reporting, which are implemented as individual actions within the stages of a pipeline.
What is a Pipeline?
Pipelines are one-way processing paths that include no branching. A pipeline is a
named sequence of stages containing actions, representing a non-branching oneway
processing path. It is used to specify the message flow for service requests and
responses. A stage is a user-configured processing step. Messages fed into the
pipelines are accompanied by a set of message context variables that contain the
message contents. They can be accessed or modified by actions in the pipeline
stages.
What is a Pipeline Pair?
Pipeline pairs are request and response pipelines. The request pipeline definition
specifies the actions that Oracle Service Bus performs on request messages to the
proxy service before invoking a business service or another proxy service. The
response pipeline definition specifies the processing that Oracle Service Bus
performs on responses from the business or proxy service that the proxy service
invokes before returning a response to a client.
