Monday, August 31, 2015

BPM Suite 12c: Oracle Adaptive Case Management: Monitoring Case Events

Oracle Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is an interesting addition to Oracle BPM Suite which has been introduced in 11.1.1.7. Adaptive Case Management is suitable to model complex work-flows in which there is no set order of activities taking place. This allows more control to the end user on what to do when.

When a case is started, it is a running process in the SOA infrastructure. The main component is Oracle Business Rules which governs (among other things) the availability of activities and when certain process milestones are achieved. The case API allows you to query the case events and milestones (how you can expose the API as a service is described here and here by Roger Goossens).

Sometimes people want to obtain information about cases such as;
  • in how many cases has a certain activity been executed?
  • in which cases has a certain milestone been reached?
Cases can crash, be restarted, migrated, aborted, purged, etc. Sometimes you might not want to depend on the running case being there to provide the information you want. Also using the API every time you want certain information might put a serious strain on your system. Using sensors or BAM might help but they require an investment to implement and are still manual implementations with no guarantee you can obtain information in the future you did not think you would need in the present/past.

Monday, August 24, 2015

SOA Suite 12c: Best practices for project structure and deployment

Efficient usage of version control has specific requirements to allow identification of versions and synchronous development on different branches. Design time you will want to have your Service Bus projects in a single application in order to allow usage of shared objects. At deploy-time or when creating a release, you want to group SCA composites together with Service Bus projects. How do you combine these different requirements?

In this article I'll describe several practices and considerations which can help you structuring your version control and artifact repository. The main challenge is finding a workable balance between the amount/complexity your deployment scripts and developer productivity / focus on business value. A lot of scripts (large investment) can make it easy for developers on the short term, however those scripts can easily become a burden.

If you are just looking for some good practices to structure your version control and artifact repository, look at the list below. If however you want to know why I think certain things are good and bad practice, read on.