Oracle Service Bus IDE (Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse) Installation Demystified

I've seen several sites that explain some steps on installing the Eclipse IDE, but nothing that presents an approach for knowing which version of the OEPE is required for which version of the Oracle Service Bus.  Hopefully you find this helpful and by "learning how to fish" can give a more sustainable approach to getting developers up and running in the OSB IDE sooner than later without any issues.

First, this is assuming you're installing the OEPE for 11g Oracle Service Bus.  With 12c the plan is to have Oracle Service Bus development available in JDeveloper 12c, and hopefully this process is much more straightforward and less confusing.

Find the OSB Installation Guide matching the version of OSB you're developing against.

This sounds pretty obvious, but if you find the correct installation guide for the correct version, there should be a reference to the version of OEPE to download in the "Obtaining the Software" section.  There should also be a handy link to the downloads page.  Follow the general instructions for installing the software provided by the link on that page, with the following key point:

• At a minimum, you'll need to select the OEPE along with the Evaluation database.  The other options are not required for just setting up a development environment and testing on a remote OSB server.  Of course, for local testing you'll want to install Weblogic server in its entirety and probably Coherence as well.

This will install the correct version of Eclipse to support your specific OSB server, along with general server-side libraries required.  This does not include the actual Oracle Service Bus binaries and libraries, so at this point you'll be unable to do OSB development from the Eclipse installed.

Download the OSB Version needed and install

From the Oracle Service Bus downloads page, find the version of OSB needed and download the binaries under the "Product Installation" section.  Note that you just installed the prerequisites, so that step is not needed.  Follow the instructions to extract this .zip somewhere on your machine and start the setup executable.   Note that if you don't have an updated version of Java available on your path, you'll need to start the installer using

./setup -jreLoc {Path to Java home directory from previous step installation}

Hope this helps clarify the general installation process for the OSB IDE (OEPE).  After this step, you should be able to start the Eclipse editor under the directory used in the first step, in the  "oepe_{version}" subdirectory.  Good luck!

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Composite Fails to Load After Restart

We had an issue at one site where a specific AQ-adapter initiated SOA composite was constantly failing to load properly, leaving the composite in an indeterminate state, where it couldn't be undeployed or redeployed.  This was perplexing since there were other composites subscribing to other AQ queues that were not experiencing this startup failure.  At first this was just chalked up to a poorly installed instance of SOA Suite, but after further examination the cause became crystal clear.

When I compared the source code of the failing process to other similar ones that weren't failing on server restarts, I could tell that the issue was related to how this particular composite was calling another SOA composite for error handling (which all of the SOA composites call).  In the failing composite, it was referencing the WSDL using a URL retrieved from the Enterprise Manager console for that composite, e.g. "http://{server}:{port}/soa-infra/services/{partition}/{compositeName}/{serviceName}?WSDL".  By referencing the WSDL this way, it requires the composite be running and loaded prior to this composite requesting it, since it's requesting the WSDL from the composite itself, and not just referring to the WSDL as a static document.  There is no determinate way to predict which order SOA composites will be loaded by the infrastructure, so doing it this was typically caused issues with the composite to where it would need to be recompiled as a different version and deployed again each time the server is restarted.

To solve this, there is a preferred way and an alternate way of the above solution.  The preferred way is to store common artifacts in the Metadata Store and reference them from your composites where possible, so utility composites like an error handler's WSDL would definitely fall in this category.  For this simple project, it was determined to instead reference the WSDL as a static document living in the infrastructure independent of the composite being loaded.  To do this, we changed the WSDL URL being referenced to http://{server}:{port}/soa-infra/services/{partition}/{compositeName}/{WSDLFilename}wsdl in the composite.xml in the import section, as well as the reference/ui:wsdlLocation attribute that references the service.  However, the previous format for the URL was left in the section in the same .  

To be clear, using MDS to store these common artifacts is a better solution, but for a down and dirty quick solution this is an alternate option.

Using Spring Portlet MVC 3.0 in Oracle Webcenter Portal (Spaces)

You may find yourself in the same quandary as me.  I want to stand up a portal quickly at an Oracle shop(client), so Webcenter Portal is currently the defacto choice as the solution, and in this case Spaces has been chosen for its ease of setup and collaboration (including built-in integration with BPM).  However, the client is not an ADF development shop, but is familiar with another web development framework like Spring MVC. Since the only way to expose portlets in Webcenter Portal 11g is using WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets), it shouldn't really matter what framework you use to develop the portlet as long as it is deployed using WSRP you can register it with Webcenter Portal and use it as you desire.  Note that there are plenty of more informed blogs and websites that provide the argument whether to use Webcenter Portal: Framework vs. Webcenter Portal: Spaces, as well as whether to extend your portal using either WSRP Portlets or ADF task flows.  I will defer to those sites on providing you those decisions to make, but if you have selected WSRP Portlets, here's how you can use your favorite IDE to develop them and deploy them properly to Webcenter Portal: Spaces.  Doing the same with Framework would entail similar steps, you would need to create a WSRP connection to the portlet producer from within JDeveloper and add the portlet to your page through JDeveloper instead of the Spaces web application. As a quick overview, I tried determining how to WSRP enable my portlet for some time before I stumbled onto the documentation within Oracle's 11g docs describing how this can be done via script as a pre-deployment step for any JSR-286 compliant portlet.  This instruction is within the administrator's guide and not the developer's guide, which made me realize their intention of separation of roles for deployment.  So I will document how to get a portlet into Webcenter Portal in several steps based on role to be consistent with this intention:

1. Developer creates JSR-168/286 compliant portlet using their IDE and whatever framework they want
2. Developer packages portlet up as EAR file for deployment
3. Deployer updates EAR file using provided script to expose JSR-286 portlet as WSRP Portlet Producer EAR, and adds weblogic.xml to embedded WAR to specify shared library to include (otherwise deployment FAILS)
4. Deployer deploys WSRP .ear to Webcenter Portlet Producers server.
5. Webcenter Portal: Spaces Administrator registers WSRP v2 portlet producer in Webcenter Portlet: Spaces using WSDL URL.
6. Webcenter Portal: Spaces page designer adds portlet to desired page and sets any default configurations.

Oracle Webcenter Portal 11.1.1.6 VirtualBox: Installing Webcenter Portlet Producers

Overview

In order to integrate some existing web site content/functionality into your Webcenter Portal, you'll likely need to have the provided Portlet Producers Omniportlet and Web Clipping portlet installed in your Webcenter virtual machine.  These make integrating with existing sites much easier and quicker than a home-grown solution, but will need to be installed if you're using the Oracle VirtualBox VM that includes Webcenter Portal.

Prerequisites

First, you'll have to download the VirtualBox VM that runs Webcenter Portal from Oracle at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/learnmore/vmsoa-172279.html.

Second, you should have already installed it, and then started it up per the instructions at the site above.  In my case I have configured the "domain" wc_spaces, since I want to setup to use Webcenter Portal: Spaces locally.

Take a Backup/Snapshot of the VirtualBox Image

Of course nothing will go wrong, right?!?!  But just in case, make sure you at least snapshot your VM prior to following these steps.

Adding Webcenter Portal Portlet Producers

Since the virtual machine does not include the Omniportlet and Web Clipping portlet out of the box, you'll need to install these and integrate the new WC_Portlet server installed into the VMConfig application Oracle ships with the virtual machine.

Publishing large XML docs from BPEL to an XMLType column

As is often the case, this was purely a trial-and-error experiment that I got working in a specific way, but there may be other ways as well. In other words, use these instructions at your own risk, as I assume no liability for any problems these may cause in your environment.