AIA Foundation Pack Architecture Overview

The Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack (recently renamed to just Foundation Pack) at is Oracle's accelerator framework for implementing SOA-based system integrations. AIA FP and its prebuilt integrations such as PIPs were originally created to facilitate and accelerate the integration between different Oracle applications such as Siebel, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, among others. Customers looking to simultaneously implement and integrate several Oracle applications gain huge benefits from employing PIPs, as these significantly reduce the effort and risk involved with building interfaces to support business processes. Given Oracle's aggressive and continuous growth by acquisition, AIA FP and prebuilt integrations have become fundamental to rapidly integrate newly acquired products with their existing apps portfolio.

The AIA FP contains a variety of design-time and runtime artifacts that can be used when defining, designing, building, testing, and deploying SOA solutions. The following diagram presents an overview of the different components that build up the AIA FP:

The AIA FP consists of:

·         AIA Architecture Framework Standards

·         Service Constructor JDeveloper Plugin

·         Code Compliance Inspector (CCI)

·         Lifecycle Workbench

·         Composite Application Validation System (CAVS)

·         Setup Pages

·         AIA Message Resubmission Utility

·         AIA Solution Pack

·         AIA Harvester

·         AIA Deployment Plan Generator

·         AIA Installation Driver

·         AIA WSM Policies

·         AIA Composites

·         AIA Prebuilt Integrations

·         AIA Error Handling Framework

·         AIA Metadata

The preceding components will be described in the following sections.

Design-time Artifacts

These artifacts include tools, libraries, and other AIA assets that support the design-time phase of a project. These tools are:

·         AIA Architecture Framework Standards: Consists of artifacts available for use during design-time governance stages. These include a reference architecture, a methodology, reference process models, conventions, and the AIA object library, which is basically a collection of XML artifacts such as XSD's and WSDLs, available for use.

·         Service Constructor JDeveloper Plugin: JDeveloper plugin used to automate the creation of AIA services. At present this plugin only supports the creation of AIA Business Connector Services (ABCS)

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·         Code Compliance Inspector (CCI): JDeveloper plugin that can be used to check that code in SOA projects is compliant with AIA standards and best practices.

·         AIA User Interfaces: A number of web applications aimed at supporting a project through the different AIA development lifecycle phases. The main web applications are:

·         Lifecycle Workbench: This application provides a comprehensive console that can be used by business analysts, solution architects, and services designers, to streamline the analysis, definition, and decomposition of SOA solutions built with AIA.

·         CAVS: The Composite Application Validation System (CAVS) is a testing application that supports the creation of stub services to simulate back end systems that might be unavailable during early testing stages. CAVS provides a mechanism for services created in accordance with the AIA standards to programmatically route a payload to CAVS, without the modification of the composite itself.

·         Setup Pages: Basically a configuration page to set up error notifications, error codes, routing configurations, and application registries, among others.

·         AIA Message Resubmission Utility: It allows browsing through a list of faults and resubmit them based on specific criteria:

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·         AIA Solution Pack: This pack seeds OER with all of the asset types, categorizations and metadata required to fully govern AIA solutions and assets.

·         AIA Utilities: A series of utilities available for post installation use with the AIA FP. The main utilities are:

·         AIA Harvester: A command line utility tailored for harvesting AIA services and assets into OER.

·         AIA Deployment Plan Generator: An Ant utility that takes the Bill of Materials file (BOM.xml), generated from the Project Lifecycle Workbench pack, as input and generates a Deployment Plan file (<projectCode>DP.xml) and a Harvester Settings file (HarvesterSettings.xml), based on the information supplied in the BOM.

·         AIA Installation Driver: An Ant utility that reads a deployment plan generated from the Deployment Plan Generator and deploys all SOA artifacts specified in the plan to the target servers contained in the installation driver properties file (AIAInstallProperties.xml).

Runtime Artifacts

These artifacts include tools, libraries, and other AIA assets that support the runtime phases of a project. The supporting tools include:

·         AIA WSM Policies: A Web Service Manager policy set created by the AIA FP installer to globally attach security policies to any AIA composite deployed to a SOA server.

·         AIA Composites: A number of SOA Suite 11g AIA composites deployed into the SOA Server. These include: AIA utility services deployed during the AIA FP installation, AIA Prebuilt Integrations, and custom developed AIA services that follow the AIA FP lifecycle. The following screenshot shows the AIA composites deployed after installation of the FP:

·         AIA Prebuilt Integrations: Prebuilt integration solutions created by Oracle with the AIA FP. There are two types of Prebuilt Integrations:

·         Direct Integrations: Basically point-to-point integrations that manage data flows and data synchronizations between applications.

·         Process Integration Packs (PIPs): Integration accelerators that combine one or more integration styles, such as data-centric integration, web services, reference data query, and/or process-centric integrations, to deliver end-to-end integration solutions.

·         AIA Error Handling Framework: This provides a complete common error handling solution for services developed following the AIA standards. As can be appreciated from the figure, the main features of the AIA Error Handling framework are:

• Support for other technologies such as Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle B2B
• Support for the main types of faults, such as system, remote, and business faults
• Configurable error notifications
• Integration with Human Workflow using the SOA/BPM Suite Worklist Application
• AIA specific error logger

·         AIA Metadata: A set of XML artifacts that mainly consist of AIA specific XSDs, WSDLs, and other XML files, that are stored in the SOA Suite Metadata Service repository (MDS). The principle component of the AIA Metadata is the AIA Components. AIA Components contains the main XML libraries available for used in AIA FP. Enterprise Business Object(s) (EBO) and Enterprise Business Message(s) (EBM) are examples of AIA XSDs available for use in the object libraries. Enterprise Business Service(s) (EBS) is an example of AIA WSDLs Assets available for use in the service libraries.

For more information on AIA Foundation Pack you may refer to my book "Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation" which includes a chapter fully dedicated to this topic and includes a sample use case based on real live experience. Book is available in the following link or any other major book store.

http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-soa-governance-11g-implementation/book