What is an Enterprise Business Flow? What is an Application Business Connector Service?

Understanding the Oracle AIA Reference Architecture 1-21 Figure 1–17 An EBS Enabling the Loose-coupling of Requesters with Actual Service Providers 1.8.3 What is an Enterprise Business Flow? An Enterprise Business Flow EBF is used to implement a business activity or a task that involves leveraging capabilities available in multiple applications. An EBF strings together a set of capabilities available in applications to implement a coarse-grained business activity or task and composes a new service that leverages existing capabilities. An EBF involves only system-to-system or service-to-service interactions and does not include any activity that requires human intervention. In a canonical integration, the EBF is an implementation of an EBS operation and calls other EBSs. An EBF never calls an ABCS or application directly. In other integration styles, the caller invoking the EBF can be an application or any other service. An EBF can be implemented using Oracle Service Bus for stateless coordination of synchronous or one-way business activities where BPEL is used to coordinate asynchronous activities. Figure 1–18 illustrates the way in which the EBF orchestrates a flow for synchronizing customers between the source application and the target application. When the sync operation is invoked from the source application, the EBF first determines if the customer already exists in the target application. If so, it updates the customer in the target application. If not, it creates the customer in the target application. 1-22 Concepts and Technologies Guide for Oracle Application Integration Architecture Figure 1–18 Example of an EBF Orchestrating the Flow from a Source to a Target 1.8.4 What is an Application Business Connector Service? An Application Business Connector Service ABCS implements the EBS interface by exposing the business functions provided by the participating application. Figure 1–19 illustrates how the ABCS functions in the integration flow. Figure 1–19 ABCS in the Integration Flow The ABCS is responsible for the coordination of the various steps provided by several business functions exposed by a provider application. For example: ■ Validation ■ Transformations: message translation, content enrichment, and normalization ■ Invocation of application functions ■ Error handling and message generation ■ Security Figure 1–20 illustrates an ABCS implementation; in this case the CRM application querying an account balance from the billing system. Understanding the Oracle AIA Reference Architecture 1-23 Figure 1–20 ABCS implementation 1-24 Concepts and Technologies Guide for Oracle Application Integration Architecture 2 Understanding EBOs and EBMs 2-1 2 Understanding EBOs and EBMs This chapter introduces Enterprise Business Objects EBOs and explains what an EBO is and why you need an EBO to facilitate an integration. The chapter then introduces Enterprise Business Messages EBMs and discusses the architecture and usages as well as how the context-specific views of the EBO can be created. This chapter includes the following sections: ■ Section 2.1, Introduction to EBOs