Leveraging Oracle ADF with BPM & SOA

In this article, I’ll share why it’s good to leverage your Oracle ADF application with BPM and SOA. Just a hint, it depends on what is your goal but if you want to achieve greater business agility the blog will be a good read. Let’s start with the below definitions:

 

1. Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework) – it’s an end to end solution build on top of Enterprise Java platform. It covers every Java EE layer from the view layer and data bindings, through the business services and data access; as well as support for every development life-cycle phase from inception through support. Oracle ADF is based on MVC design pattern. JDeveloper is the recommended IDE that reduces to the minimum the need to write framework code through a declarative approach and visual aids.
2. Oracle BPM (Business Process Management) – is a methodology/technology that automates many key business processes and allows you to easily manage them.  BPM software ensures faster time-to-value, business-IT collaboration and reduced total cost of ownership. Processes from simple to very sophisticated can be easily designed, deployed, and managed. As Gangadhar Konduri, vice president, Oracle said; “With Oracle BPM Suite 12c, we are helping organisations plan and manage their entire business architecture through a flexible and secure solution that can deliver rapid time to value.”
3. Oracle SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) – is a design pattern used to create an architecture based upon the use of services. In the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), a service is an interface definition that may list several discrete services/operations. SOA creates IT assets in such a way that they can flexibly respond to business needs. Here are some proved benefits: business flexibility, better business practices, easier integration and re-use of assets.

 All three are from the same Oracle Fusion Middleware stack. As a consequence, ADF is the most natural way to implement the UI for the BPM Human tasks. The advantage of ADF compared to .Net is that both implementation and deployment on the WebLogic server are easy. Another advantage is that one can implement business scenarios in ADF Business Components and expose them as web services.

Then these services can be consumed by Oracle SOA and BPM. BPM can function without SOA and SOA can work with BPEL not BPMN (graphical representation for specifying business processes in a BPM), however, together they are a lot more powerful than separate.
BPM fits seamlessly into an existing SOA Suite environment and uses the same development tools, deployment and build processes, management and monitoring infrastructure and the same programming model – Service Component Architecture (SCA). Additionally, when one adds Oracle BPM suite on top of SOA, he\she will not re-educate staff or change the architecture to see the additional value. Both BPEL and BPMN are open standard languages that are supported and treated as equal by Oracle. So, depending on who is the user you should select which one to use. If he/she is with a more tech background use BPEL, if more businesslike use BPMN.

SOA and BPM are the perfect pairs. With BPM company defines the business processes, monitor and manages them. Services support these processes by providing the functions needed. SOA enables the services to be combined to deliver and support an agile enterprise that is not afraid of change. Dr. Gopala Krishna Behara says that “BPM without SOA is useful for building applications, but difficult to extend to the enterprise. SOA without BPM is useful for creating reusable and consistent services, but lacks the ability to turn those services into an agile, competitive enterprise.” Nichols from Accenture notes “BPM and SOA need each other to be successful, otherwise they will be relegated just as enterprise integration was”.

In conclusion, all three can function without each other but together they form something really powerful for the enterprises. Oracle ADF, BPM and SOA should be used together if possible and will deliver results that can be astounding. Ask us for free consultancy on the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack at ask@dreamix.eu

I`ll be glad to answer your questions.

P.S. I’ve used many informational sources for this article. Please check them below for more details about these three Oracle products

 

• http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/05-06-WP-BPM-SOA-Behara.pdf
• http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/In-depth-BPM-and-SOA-for-business-agility-Next-generation-enterprise-IT
• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/adf11g-data-sheet-1-133847.pdf
• http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/service-oriented-architecture
• http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/insight/business-case-bpm-wp-171710.pdf

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