Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is an extensive integration solution for orchestrating agile, user-centric business processes across enterprise applications. AIA offers pre-built solutions at the data level, process level. And also at user-interface levels, which delivers a complete process solution to customers and the end-users. All the AIA components are designed to work in a mix-and-match way. They are built for configurability, ultimately helping to cut IT costs and the burden of building, extending, and maintaining integrations.
AIA is powered by Oracle Fusion Middleware, AIA enables organizations to use the applications of their choice to create Composite Business Processes (CBPs) following these simple principles, which define the basic rules for development, maintenance, and usage of a service-oriented architecture (SOA):
- Granularity, modularity, compose ability, Reuse, componentization, and interoperability.
- Standards-compliance (both common and industry-specific).
- Service identification and categorization, provisioning and delivery, and monitoring and tracking.
This guide gives you an understanding on:
- Features of AIA
- The Integration Flow Concept
- Integration Styles
- AIA Reference Process Modules
- What is AIA Conceptual service?
- AIA Shared Service Inventory
Features of AIA
- A robust architectural framework for engineering service-oriented business processes.
- Support for interaction styles to handle high transaction rates and volumes that are associated with mission-critical applications.
- Ability to leverage functionality provided by various Oracle and customer-owned software assets.
- The ability for customers to extend various AIA artifacts delivered as part of Pre-Built Integrations.
- Support for process model decomposition and analysis, service design, service construction, process definition, deployment plan generation, deployment, and upgrade.
- Governance of design-time and run-time AIA artifacts.
The Integration Flow Concept
An integration flow represents the movement of a message from a business event-triggering source, through possible intermediary milestones, to one or more target milestones as shown in the below diagram. At each milestone, the message is stored in a different state.
This integration flow represents the run-time path of a message. It is not a design-time artifact.
There is no “one size, that fits all” approach in integration. The requirements and objectives of the integration drive the selection of integration styles and supporting design patterns. AIA supports a wide range of integration styles and patterns to enable the flight of a message in an integration flow. The AIA artifacts required for the collaboration between applications or functions are dependent on the integration style adopted for an integration flow.
Integration Styles
The integration styles:
- Data-centric integration
Data-centric integrations change the data from its source format into its target format. They provide some level of logic in the transformation process to make it useful and coherent to the target environment.
- Integration through native interfaces
Every application executes on top of its own technology stack. Based on the application architecture, there are one or more supported ways to integrate with the application.
- Integration through Web services
XML-based Web services are a technology platform-independent way of integrating application interfaces. Using XML as the common language, business transactions are transferred from one application to another in near real-time. Web services are exposed using industry standards such as WSDL and SOAP (or in a REST-ful manner), which shields the implementation and connectivity details of the provider application from the consumer.
- Reference data query
Reference data query addresses supplemental information which is important to complete and facilitate business transactions but is not in and of itself part of the primary integration activity. Web services have further fueled the availability of reference data from third-party providers, and many companies offer reference data services on a subscription basis.
- Process-centric integration
While many applications expose Web service interfaces, there is a growing need for a more coordinated exchange of messages between applications. This orchestrated exchange of messages is typically intended to support one or more business processes. As a part of the orchestration of messages, additional activities may take place, such as message transformation, enrichment, or validation.
An example of the process-centric integration style is the orchestration of transactional data, from the point of capture through transformation and movement to back-office systems. You can also use this style to drive the movement of transactional data through a process, based on a business event.
AIA Reference Process Modules
AIA Reference Process Models are a collection of best practices from various Oracle application portfolios. These AIA models are delivered as Oracle Business Process Analyzer content.
The main purposes of Reference Process Models are listed below :
- It helps to categorize Business Processes into Business Activities and Tasks
- Build a repository of reusable Business Activities and Tasks
- Establish key performance indicators
- It aids in identifying equivalent AIA service artifacts described as part of the AIA service inventory
What is AIA Conceptual service?
The AIA Conceptual Services are developed by the help of Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies.
- Reuse, granularity, modularity, composability, componentization, and interoperability
- Standards-compliance (both common and industry-specific)
- Service identification and categorization, provisioning and delivery, and monitoring and tracking
AIA Conceptual Services are categorized into Process Services, Activity Services, Data Services, Connector Services, and Infrastructure Services.
AIA Shared Service Inventory
Shared Services are application-agnostic services programmed to build cross-application Composite Business Processes (CBPs). A successful AIA implementation is dependent on a robust Shared Services Inventory.
The various categories described in this section help relate Shared Services to Reference Process Model artifacts. The Figure depicts elements in the Shared Services Inventory.
