OAS Questions

[gregglarkin]

List

Late Friday afternoon, after months of research comparing 8.12 vs SAP and intense negotiations, our company has decided to "come back in from the cold" and has reinstated our maintenace contract with Oracle and will be embarking on a muti-year, multi-country migration from XE to 8.12. We will also be using the Fusion middleware extensively for JDE and non-JDE related projects.

I have two OAS questions for the list gurus.

1) Can I impliment OAS with XE, or am I limited to Websphere 6? I'll be on XE for my North American system for several more years while we work on other regions and I need to update my web server from WAS 4.0

2) What is the relationship between OAS, Business Integration (BI), and Business Process Management (BPM)? We are currently using Webmethods and XPI for our business integration, but we will be transitioning over to the Oracle BI solution.

Gregg Larkin

 

[altquark]

Hi Greg

OAS is only supported with 8.96+ - with SP23, you are restricted to Websphere 6 and 6.1 only I'm afraid ! I don't expect Oracle will extend support to OAS for Xe/8.0 customers any time soon either. It IS impressive that you're actually running WAS with Xe - what service pack are you currently running (assuming that you froze your toolset release when you stopped maintenance)

 

[gregglarkin]

Jon,

The JAS server went in under SP22 and we've left it there. I'll be taking my XE system up to the latest greatest Tools Release and we'll start looking at the latest updates and get things as current as possible. We're also going to get the database up to SQL 2005. In the mean time, we'll set up an 8.12 sandbox and start to update our custom code up to 8.12 standards. Our first instance to go live on 8.12 will be Western Europe and then we'll keep rolling from there.

Gregg

 

[cmanderson]

The relationship between them is this: they are all a part of "Oracle Fusion Middleware". Please don't shoot me, I couldn't resist. Still, there is a lot of truth to my statement in the sense that Oracle Fusion Middleware is a nice marketing ploy for what is in reality some quality software with a lot of trendy buzz words associated with it.

Actually, many, but not all of the components (see BAM) can be installed on top of OAS. This is a lot to wrap ones head around, but before going further, it's important to start thinking of Oracle Application Server in terms of an enterprise middleware platform rather than simply "OAS, the JDE JAS server platform" when considering the Integration and BPM components.

"Oracle Business Process Management consists of components from Oracle BPA Suite and Oracle SOA Suite. Oracle Business Process Management represents the foundation for integrating Oracle's portfolio of applications through Application Integration Architecture."

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/bpm/index.html

The SOA suite is a collection of Business Rules, JDeveloper, BPEL Process Manager, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Web Services Manager and Enterprise Service Bus. The BPM Suite consists of Business Process Architect, Simulator, Publisher and Repository. The backend integration pieces can share a common metadata repository which is tied into the OAS Infrastructure installation. Business Integration includes other components such as Integration Server B2B, RFID and Sensors, Data Hubs, enterprise integration adapters for various ERP's, etc. There is some overlap between "Business Integration" and "Business Process Management" suites from Oracle. Notably, SOA.

Have fun with your migration from webMethods. When you ultimately move to 8.12, the Business Services functionality in 8.97 and beyond is quite interesting.

 

[gregglarkin]

Charles,

Thank you for that post - that was exactly what I was looking for. Sounds like you've been playing around with the red stack for a while. You should consider writing a white paper on that. That would be a good Quest presentation too.

Gregg

 

[cmanderson]

- Correction -

BAM can be installed on OAS, but it is a Windows only application. No UNIX or Linux. Oracle recommends the version of BAM and OAS used be the same.