Enterprise Composite Applications, Applications Integration Architecture

Enterprise Composite Applications, Applications Integration Architecture An Oracle White Paper December 2008 Enterprise Composite Applications, Applications Integration Architecture Executive Overview.......................................................................................... 3 Oracle Application Integration Architecture................................................. 3 PROBLEM: Too Many Applications for Completing a Task Delivers Decreased Service Levels ................................................................................. 4 SOLUTION: AIA Enterprise Composite Applications ............................. 5 CASE STUDY: Master Data management, Customer Match & Fetch Composite Application..................................................................................... 6 Identifying Enterprise Composite Applications Patterns............................ 8 Application Consolidation........................................................................... 8 Application Reuse ......................................................................................... 9 New Application ........................................................................................... 9 Natively Extended Application................................................................. 10 Building Enterprise Composite Application: Comprehensive Support for UI Technologies .............................................................................................. 10 Oracle ADF Enterprise Composite Applications.................................. 12 Conclusion........................................................................................................ 13 Enterprise Composite Applications, Application Integration Architecture Page 2 Enterprise Composite Applications, Face of AIA EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Most IT organizations today are grappling with the dual challenges of integrating their portfolio of heterogeneous applications and the costs of training users how to use multiple applications to complete their daily tasks. IT’s top priority is to find a sustainable, low risk, low cost solution that enables companies to bring together their best of breed applications and use them as an integrated whole. Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA) was created to fulfill the demand for such a solution. This whitepaper focuses on how AIA Enterprise Composite Applications empower IT to build user interfaces that ultimately enable it to run the business better. ORACLE APPLICATION INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE Oracle AIA is best described as architecture in a box. It not only provides prebuilt integrations between applications in the Oracle portfolio, it also delivers the business process composition framework underneath the prebuilt integrations, thereby enabling users of AIA to extend the prebuilt integrations as well as to create and govern new integrations. This business process composition framework, also known as the Foundation Pack, provides a programming model, a methodology, and application independent objects and services to construct loosely coupled integrations that are flexible, extensible, scalable, low cost and low risk. In the absence of AIA, IT organizations resort to risky investments in brittle, high cost, high maintenance point-to-point integrations. Given that most companies today opt for a best of breed portfolio instead of the monolithic application suites of the past, the only way for such companies to ensure that applications in the portfolio are integrated and play well together is to adopt AIA. Enterprise Composite Applications, Application Integration Architecture Page 3 Figure 1: Oracle Applications Integration Architecture Figure 1 illustrates that the prebuilt integrations offered by Oracle are end to end solutions involving multiple applications. These integrations are based on best practices as defined by the industry the processes represent. The integrations are built using the methodology defined by AIA, leverage the AIA programming model, and ultimately rest upon the application independent Enterprise Business Services to achieve loose coupling. PROBLEM: TOO MANY APPLICATIONS FOR COMPLETING A TASK DELIVERS DECREASED SERVICE LEVELS A lack of Composite Applications and the lack of a strategy and infrastructure for building such applications lead to sub-optimal solutions with low user adoption. One common characteristic of such solutions is that UI integrations are typically implemented independently of the associated business process. Even if IT is able to deliver a well-integrated business process, there is little or no improvement from the end-user’s point of view. Here are some examples that illustrate some of the stopgap measures taken: Swivel Chair Integrations In the absence of composite applications, IT generally deals with a heterogeneous portfolio by forcing users to master multiple systems. This leads to swivel-chair integrations where a user has to master multiple applications to carry out their daily tasks. This is a costly and risky path because applications are continually being added and dropped from the company’s portfolio, hence requiring the user to constantly learn new tricks to accomplish routine tasks, and new users are continuously joining or leaving the work force. Intrusive Extensions Enterprise Composite Applications, Application Integration Architecture Page 4 Some IT organizations may try to side-step swivel chair integrations by choosing a dominant application and extending it to aggregate the needed functionality in one place. While this is a better approach than a swivel-chair integration, it is still far from optimal because under the covers it tends to be a point-to-point integration with application(s) providing the new content. It requires customization to packaged applications, which can be costly to maintain. In the worst case scenario many applications in the portfolio will need to be augmented the same way, requiring intrusive and point-to-point changes for all affected applications – leading to little or no reuse. Furthermore, as new versions of the dominant application are released, there may not be a straightforward way to migrate the extensions made to prior versions. Rip-and-Replace In situations where IT has the option of building a net new application to aggregate and surface content from various applications in the portfolio, once again a point- to-point methodology is typically used which exposes the UI to any changes in the participating applications. These new applications are one-off projects. There is no consistent mechanism for dealing with transactions, security, logging, navigations etc. because there is no underlying infrastructure and framework that provides supports for such features. This is a costly solution, which is difficult to build, upgrade and maintain and it has to be repeated every single time a new application is needed. SOLUTION: AIA ENTERPRISE COMPOSITE APPLICATIONS The integration needs for an IT organization are best served by a well defined strategy that ensures there is a consistent, flexible and repeatable approach for building composite applications. These composite applications should be reusable, insulated from changes in provider systems and enable IT to augment existing applications as non-intrusively as possible. This approach is embodied by AIA Enterprise Composite Applications. At the core of Enterprise Composite Applications (ECAs) are the application independent Enterprise Business Objects and Services. In the integrations developed using AIA architecture, the Enterprise Business Object data model serves as a common data abstraction across systems. This canonical data model is what enables the loose coupling between systems being integrated. Instead of creating point-to-point mapping between schemas of the systems participating in an integration, each system maps to the canonical data model provided by the Enterprise Business Objects. To ensure that the data model can support any-to-any integration and not just Oracle integrations, the Enterprise Business Object definitions are based on industry standards like OAGIS, UNCEFACT. In addition, they are rationalized against dozens of applications owned by Oracle. The result is a set of best-of-breed objects that are built and delivered by AIA. The Enterprise Business Services go hand-in-hand with Enterprise Business Objects. Enterprise Business Services represent application independent web service definition for performing a business Enterprise Composite Applications, Application Integration Architecture Page 5 task. These services expose coarse-grained, message-driven interfaces for the purposes of exchanging data between applications. The Enterprise Business Objects and Services are used to build application independent business processes and it is the same set of objects and services that can be leveraged to create composite applications. AIA’s viewpoint is that composite applications and composite processes together make the business process integration and that the best way to achieve business process integration is to use the AIA methodology, objects and services. AIA Enterprise Composite Applications thus have the following characteristics: • They are enterprise-class applications that are durable and transactional with support for navigation, security, transactions, languages etc. • They harness the power of Service Oriented Architecture and hence are loosely coupled and are application independent. As a result they are reusable applications that are future-proofed because there is little or no impact when the provider applications change.