SOA Readiness Assement

Are you ready for SOA? Is your organisation prepared to embrace SOA? How are your customers looking to SOA technology? Will SOA reduce my costs?

Many questions I get on Oracle SOA projects. It depends on the level in the organization; the boardroom; operations; but the questions are in general the same. Is the organisation ready to use Service Oriented Architecture.

Oracle have created a test to find out how SOA fits in the current organisatition. Here is the link to do your test:

Oracle SOA Readiness Assesment

The test is based on questions you have to answer in the following categories:

• Business & Strategy
• Architecture
• Infrastructure
• Information
• Projects, Portfolios & Services
• Operations, Administration & Management
• Organization
• Governance

The result will show a report, including a spider diagram, based on the categories. It describes how far your organisation is ready to use SOA. It means that on some categories you can use it without having much impact, while on other categories you have to do some more work.

The result is send via email, containing a PDF with the results.

The spier diagram of the SOA assesment.

Note that this test will give different results when you do this test with operations department only or with financial department. If you want to execute this for the whole organization; get all the stakeholders together and answer the questions together.

As result of this test, you are able to find quick-win projects, that can be implemented into a SOA architecture. You will know on which categories you have to spend more time to put them at a higher SOA level.

Execute this test periodically to find out if there are any improvements.

There is also a Oracle Business Process Managment Life cycle assement.

The diagram of a BPM assesment.

Oracle ESB Cluster deployment

When you have configured Oracle ESB cluster and want to deploy, you could end in deployment issues. While in JDeveloper you have developed your ESB service, it deploys successfully. But when you want to access it, via the browser or via BPEL lookup, you get and error.

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://host:7777/esb/wsil/MySystem/1_0/HelloESBService?wsdl
Line Number 1, Column 1:

In the log file of the Oracle ESBDT engine (oc4j_ebdt), you see more detailed log.

9/03/02 11:08:22 oracle.tip.esb.console.exception.ConsoleException: An unhandled exception has been thrown in the ESB system.
The exception reported is: "WSDL Parsing Failed: org.apache.slide.structure.ObjectNotFoundException: No object found at /files/ESB_Projects/MySystem/HelloESBService.wsdl: java.lang.RuntimeException: org.apache.slide.structure.ObjectNotFoundException: No object found at
at oracle.tip.esb.server.bootstrap.protocol.esb.ESBURLConnection.connect(Unknown Source)
at oracle.tip.esb.server.bootstrap.protocol


This is is not related to the configuraion of the Oracle ESB server. I assume that this is correctly configured, this also applies for a cluster environment. The error is due to the fact the ESB server expects the services from the database, while the deployed services is pointing to a file based repository.

Normally the ESB server is using a file based repository, in this case the ESB server is configured to use a database repoistory. This is often used in cluster environments.

The solution is to change your ESB service. This means open all your *.esbsvc files and look for XML element

<wsdlURL>file.extension</wsdlURL>

Make sure you replace it with

<wsdlURL>esb:///file.extension</wsdlURL>

Check all the 'esbsvc' files if they are using the correct url and not pointing to ESB_projects.