Oracle Fusion Applications 11g BASICS

We are trying to build up a Oracle Fusion Apps environment on a Exalogic system, though still on bare metal, because officially there still is no Oracle VM available yet on Exalogic. It is a bit of a challenge, but getting to know the basics and which components the install, build and configure phase use, might bring you a step further on the way .

The main components we used to build an Oracle Fusion Apps environment are:

This gives you, as shown in this picture, the following schematic overview:

But, before that, let’s start on the almost ‘bare metal’. The Exalogic machine has a nice tool shipped, called the Sun’s ZFS Storage manager, in which we defined mountpoints and filesystems for our IDM and Fusion Apps. Of course, this has nothing to do with Fusion Apps but because we execute on a Exalogic machine, I thought it was nice to mention it.

We took 2 compute nodes for this. This is a screenshot how it was configured:

Sun ZFS Storage Manager

We divided into 4 filesystems, 2 for the IDM and Fusion Databases, and 2 for the IDM Middleware, and the Fusion Apps Middleware and provisioning.

Various components in an typical Oracle Fusion Apps Build:

Oracle WebLogic Server 11g

Oracle’s Enterprise Java Application server is used as the underlayer from the Fusion Middleware stack, where all the upper components will land on. The entire Identity Management stack relies on this strong, robust and scalable Java application Server.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Both the complete Identity Management stack as well the Oracle Fusion Applications make use of the services layer provided by the Oracle SOA Suite. Fusion Apps uses composite SOA applications for web services to communicate among themselves and connect to the database, content management, and also some business intelligence components.

Oracle Identity and Access Management

Oracle Fusion Apps uses the so called Service Oriented Security model provided by the Oracle Identity Management Suite, which relies for some parts on the Oracle SOA Suite, like for automatic task flows, user life cycle management and so on.

The entire stack is involved in these processes:

• Authentication, Authorization and auditing mechanisms
• Roles and entitlements
• Directory Services
• User Provisioning
• Policy Stores
• Session Data Management

It is build on the OPSS (Oracle Platform Security Services) framework which provides a uniform solution for Fusion Applications to have a standard set of security services. In fact, the work is done outside Fusion Apps and through a plugin provisioned to the Fusion Apps. OPSS implements the Java standards and provides Role Based Access, Java Authorization and Authentication Services (JAAS), and Java Authorization Contract for Containers (JACC).

The Oracle Identity Management Suite provides the following components:

• Single Sign on through Oracle Acces Management
• Directory Services through Oracle Internet Directory
• Virtualized Directory Services through Oracle Virtual Directory. A virtualized layer for unification of multiple directories without synchronization
• Authentication through Oracle Identity Management

Oracle ADF 11g

The core of Oracle Fusion Apps are ADF. All screens are built from ADF, and the metadata driven architecture behind it makes it possible to develop business focussed and user experience oriented. ADF works with several layers, like the Business Service layer, which for example provides access to data from various sources and handles business logic. The view layer provides the real user experience and the controller layer provides a mechanism to control the flow of a web application user input.

Conclusion

This product has become quite huge, in my opinion it should be controlled by multi competence participants. I not even discussed all components. The Identity Management suite alone is quite complex itself. However, I think the way Oracle is going is the right one, making a uniform solution build on standard Fusion Middleware.

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