Integration on the middle tier: Oracle AIA

My very first post is a post that i already have done in the internal blogs of Capgemini, my employer. I re-post it here because I want to write about AIA in one of my next posts and don’t want to tell this story again, so a post from june 2008:

This week I was in Reading at the UK headquarters of Oracle for the training: ‘AIA foundation Pack’. Until now I thought Application Integration Architecture (AIA) was just a nice term for a vague Architecture Oracle had invented, big was my surprise on how concrete AIA is and how well thought it’s structure.
With AIA added tot it’s products Oracle completes the integration on all tiers. On the user interface tier Oracle had Portal and his replacement: Webcenter which is very promising. On the database -tier Oracle had several choices for integration: Streams, Warehousebuilder, OBIEE and Oracle Data Integrator. And now on the SOA middle tier: AIA. The basis structure of AIA is in figure 1.

AIA’s foundation is the Enterprise Business Object (EBO). The EBO is a so called canonical model. A canonical model is the central definition of an object within the enterprise, it is the result of a nogatiations with (owners of) applications, and represents the central definition of an object. The EBO is used by the Enterprise Business Message (EBM). The EBM is a message which consists of an EBO, a message header and operator. The EBM is used for the communication between all the services of the AIA. The Enterprise Business Service (EBS) is the web-service that takes the EBM as payload and handles it between applications. A special form of EBS is the Enterprise Business Flow when a work-flow is covered in the service.

The Application Business Connector Service (ABCS) decouples the applicaton system from the canonical EBO. All transformations are performed here. When it gets the input of an application server the ABCS converts the Input to the EBO, when the ABCS delivers the output to an application system, it converts the EBO to output that can be handled by the target system. These are the basics of AIA. All of the above mentioned services are implementation agnostic. The technical implementation still has to be performed.

AIA V1 hasn’t got all this elements, this will be from version 2. Other elements that are part of V2 AIA: Extensibility (a new version of AIA will not affect these changes), error handling ( in a lot of SOA’s difficult, oracle has made a sound mechanism) and a Business Service Repository (BSR). This BSR on itself is a reason to consider AIA.
Services within a SOA need to be discovered easily, the UDDI has the responsibility for this in a SOA. But a basic UDDI is not enough. The BSR of Oracle AIA is founded on the UDDI principles but extended and has many search features to find Services within a SOA.

Oracle (together with SI’s around the world) is developing pre packaged implementations of AIA for certain business, for instance Order to Cash for Telco. These implementations are called PIP’s, process integration packages and are implementations of AIA. These PIP’s extend your ‘make or buy’ decision to SOA integration, this is what makes AIA a very promising architecture: it delivers added value by delivering services that you can reuse!

More information: http://www.oracle.com/applications/oracle-application-integration-architecture.html