A PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOA

A Collaborative Marketplace

Sophie Rousseau

ORACLE Consulting, Colombes, France

Olivier Camp, Slimane Hammoudi

GRI, ESEO, Angers, France

Keywords:

SOA, BPEL, Web services, Collaborative marketplace, ERP, ORACLE.

Abstract:

The economical context greatly impacts companies and their Information Systems (IS). Companies have new

competitors or develop new business skills, delocalize whole or part of their organization. Moreover they

are faced with powerful competitors, and new products, ﬁtting customer needs, must be developped fast,

sometimes in less than 3 months. These companies’ ISs need to cope with such complex evolutions and have

to overcome the resulting changes. Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are widely used by companies to

gain in ﬂexibility and Web services, by providing interoperability and loose coupling, is the ﬁtted technical

solution used to support SOA. Basic Web services are assembled into composite Web services in order to

directly support business processes. The aim of this work is to present a practical and successful application

of SOA towards the design of a collaborative marketplace. An implementation in the Oracle environment is

achieved using the BPEL Process Manager allowing an integration of the different components involved in the

design of a collaborative marketplace. In particular, this paper illustrates, through a practical example, how

the SOA approach promotes interoperability, one of its main strengths, by integrating an open source ERP into

a mainly ORACLE based software architecture.

1 INTRODUCTION

In today’s globalised economy, hard competition

sometimes requires for enterprises to collaborate with

one another to respond to a speciﬁc market need.

Enterprises often rely on an electronic marketplace

(e-marketplace) to support their business ; An e-

marketplace can span two rooms in the same building,

or two continents. How individuals, ﬁrms, and orga-

nizations approach and deﬁne the e-marketplaces of

the future depends on people’s ability to ask the right

questions now and to take advantage of the opportuni-

ties that will arise over the next few years (Leebaert,

1999).

When dealing with a collaborative business pro-

cess (Chen and Hsu, 2000; Liu et al., 2009) each en-

terprise’s e-marketplace should thus be able to collab-

orate with its partner’s e-marketplaces. Collaborative

marketplaces (Sadiq et al., 2006; Guo, 2007) have

been of much interest over the last decade and en-

suring interoperability between such information sys-

tems has been a major software engineering topic.

The principles of the Service Oriented Architecture

(SOA)(Erl, 2007) is now considered a standard to sup-

port interoperability between information systems.

Thousands of enterprises have adopted Service Ori-

ented Architecture (SOA) based on its promise to help

them respond more rapidly to changing business re-

quirements by composing new solutions from exist-

ing business services. To deliver on this promise,

however, companies need to integrate solid, yet ﬂex-

ible, Collaborative Business Process Management

(CBPM) plans into their SOA initiatives (Fiammante,

2009).

In this paper we show, through a practical ex-

ample, how SOA can be used to support a collab-

orative e-marketplace composed of a mainly Oracle

based software architecture, but also integrating an

open source ERP (www.compiere.com). The collabo-

rative e-marketplace relies on web services to provide

interoperability between the heterogeneous systems.

In section 2 we give a description of the proposed

332

Rousseau S., Camp O. and Hammoudi S. (2010).

A PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOA - A Collaborative Marketplace.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Databases and Information Systems Integration, pages

332-336

DOI: 10.5220/0003019303320336

 SciTePress

architecture for our collaborative marketplace. The

third section describes the design and implementation

of the marketplace. The fourth section of this article

is dedicated to the analysis of our experimentation.

Finally, we conclude in section 5.

2 ARCHITECTURE

The collaborative marketplace is built according to

the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) deﬁnes the

SOA as ”a set of components which can be called,

whose descriptions of interfaces can be published and

spotted”. The SOA is an architecture designed to al-

low low coupling between interacting software agents

or services - a service being an action to be executed

by a producer for a consumer. The implementation of

SOAs was facilitated by the apparition of standards

like Web Services. The SOA is a very effective an-

swer to the problems that companies meet in terms

of reuse, interoperability and coupling reduction be-

tween the various systems that make up their infor-

mation systems. By its standard character, an SOA

contributes to improve the speed and the productivity

of software developments and a component exposed

as a web service can be used by other applications.

Figure 1 illustrates the main architecture of our Col-

BPEL

Process Manager

ERP Compiere

(opensource)

Application Servers

Task List

Web Service

News

Web Service

Compiere

Web Service

WebCenter Suite

Rich Text Protlet

Jive

Forum

UltraSearch

BAM

SES

Oracle

E-Business Suite

Oracle

Database

Oracle

ContentDB

Figure 1: The collaborative marketplace architecture.

laborative Marketplace Platform. On this ﬁgure, the

open source Compiere ERP, together with the Ora-

cle Database storing its data, and the Oracle ERP E-

Business Suite represent two e-marketplaces that need

to collaborate. The Oracle ContentDB deals with

the collaborative marketplace’s content management.

The BPEL Process Manager (BPEL PM) represents

the heart of the collaborative system and takes care

of the integrations of the Oracle E-Business Suite,

the Oracle Content DB and the opensource Compiere

ERP. The integration of Compiere ERP is achieved

through the ”Web servicisation” of the ERP’s main

functionnalities ; access to these web services is done

by speciﬁc BPEL processes. The WebCenter product

is used for the front end web application exposed to

the ﬁnal user. This product allows the use of portlets

to design the user interface and manages the applica-

tion’s access to several web services such as the News

service - this service already exists and just needs to

be integrated in the user interface. The different ser-

vices built for the platform are deployed on OC4J (Or-

acle Container For Java) instances of the Oracle Ap-

plication Server. The project is secured by the use of

JAZN ﬁles present on these OC4J instances. JAZN

is the Oracle implementation of JAAS (Java Authen-

tication and Authorization Service) which is a stan-

dard for authentication management and role based

access control. Jive Forum, UltraSearch, Secure En-

terprise Search (SES) and Business Activity Moni-

toring (BAM) are modules not implemented in the

project.

3 DESIGN AND

IMPLEMENTATION

The realization of the marketplace was done in 4 main

steps:

• The installation of the test environment,

• The integration of the Open Source Compiere

ERP with the Oracle ERP E-Business Suite,

• The authentication management,

• The creation of the user interface.

3.1 Installation of the Test Environment

Platform

Figure 2 is a schematic representation of the test plat-

form showing the interactions between the different

components. The platform is composed of 5 com-

ponents, each one, except for the Oracle E-Business

Suite, is installed on a speciﬁc virtual machine (VM):

• An Oracle database and the Compiere ERP;

• The Oracle ContentDB;

• The Oracle SOA Suite (10g) containing BPEL

PM;

• The Oracle WebCenter Suite (10g);

• The Oracle E-Business Suite (an access to this

Oracle Application, running on a physical server,

was provided for the realization of the market-

place).

A PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOA - A Collaborative Marketplace

333

Figure 2: Test platform.

3.2 Integration of the Open Source ERP

Compiere and Oracle ERP

E-Business Suite

The integration of the Oracle ERP in the e-

marketplace was not a difﬁcult task. Indeed, the Or-

acle SOA Suite provides adapters that allow the in-

tegration of the E-Business Suite. Thus the integra-

tion of the E-Business Suite consisted in, using its in-

terface, registering a supplier and, using BPEL PM

Database adapter, detecting this registration and start-

ing the global registration process. One important

step in this process is the insertion of the E-Business

Suite as a supplier in the Compiere ERP Database.

The main problematic was the way to integrate this

Open Source ERP since its functionalities were not

exposed as web services. Looking more deeply in the

product, we found some APIs that allowed the cre-

ation of web services directly in the Compiere prod-

uct. This ﬁrst solution was not implemented due to

a lack of time. A second level of observations made

us discover that the database used to store the ERP’s

data could be accessed directly and that the tables

were easily identiﬁable. Oracle BPEL PM contains a

database adapter that allows us to access these tables.

However, for this project, we wanted the web services

level to be independent from BPEL PM. Thus, we de-

cided to develop the web services for the Compiere

ERP directly on the database using the PLSQL lan-

guage and developed stored procedures. The Oracle

IDE, JDevelopper, allows the creation of Java web

services from stored procedures and, using this func-

tionality, we were able to expose Compiere’s func-

tionalities as Web services on an OC4J instance.The

Compiere ERP was then ready to be integrated to the

marketplace. Two services have been created for the

needs of the marketplace:

• The registration of a supplier (creation of a record

in the database),

• The veriﬁcation of the existence of a given sup-

plier in the Compiere database.

3.2.1 Supplier Registration Process

The registration process is split in two steps:

Phase 1: registration on the E-Business Suite - ﬁrst

level of validation and creation of user accounts.

Phase 2: update of the needed user ﬁles and ﬁnal val-

idation of the registration.

Figure 3: Registration process.

Phase 1: Figure 3 illustrates the pre-registration

process. This ﬁrst part of the process contains the fol-

lowing steps:

• An instance of the process is created when a sup-

plier registers through the E-Business Suite regis-

tration interface. The database adapter used to de-

tect this registration receives all the supplier data.

• The Compiere service is called to check whether

the supplier is already registered.

– If not, the supplier registration needs to be val-

idated.

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∗ When the registration is accepted, a record

is created in the authentication base, a pri-

vate space is created for the supplier in Ora-

cle Content DB, an account is added for the

Jive Forum and the supplier is recorded in the

Compiere database.

∗ A notiﬁcation is sent to the supplier. Then, he

can access his space.

Phase 2: The second phase validates - or not - in

a ﬁnal way the supplier registration. This phase uses

the Oracle Content DB functionalities. Figure 4 rep-

resents the process of this phase. This second process

Figure 4: Validation of the registration.

is launched when a new document is uploaded by the

supplier. This document is then validated to allow the

update of the supplier with his ﬁnal roles and access

rights on the marketplace.

3.3 Authentication Management

JAZN, the Oracle implementation of JAAS (Java Au-

thentication Authorisation Service) is used for au-

thentication management. JAAS allows services to

authenticate users and to grant them with access con-

trol permissions. Users should authenticate before

having access to the application’s pages. Access to

the page is given if the user correctly authenticates

and only if his role gives him the sufﬁcient permis-

sion.

Access to the application is based on ﬁve roles:

USER: all the users identiﬁed by the application.

SUPPLIER: the suppliers that register on the appli-

cation. They get this role at the end of the ﬁrst

phase. It allows access to the private supplier

space.

BUYER: the simple buyers of the company.

MANAGER: the managers of the company.

RFP: the users that have access to the marketplace.

All the managers and buyers have this role. The

suppliers get this role at the end of the second

phase.

Figure 5 presents the user authentication procedure

for the application’s pages.

Figure 5: Authentication architecture.

3.4 Creation of the User Interface

The application is divided in 2 main pages:

• The buyer space (for buyers or managers): from

this page, the user can view the tasks he has to

do an action on. The ”Show tasks” button on this

page lets the buyer or manager see the details of

his tasks. This gives him access to the task appli-

cation available with BPEL PM. This application

allows him to accept or reject the registrations of

suppliers.

• The supplier space: from this page, the supplier

can consult his ﬁle directory and access the Con-

tentDB interface to add documents.

ﬁgure 6 is a screenshot of the manager space for user

jstein.

Figure 6: Manager space.

A PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOA - A Collaborative Marketplace

335

4 EXPERIMENTAL FEEDBACK

This project is a typical SOA project because of its

constraints both in terms of software and hardware.

The software constraints were explicitly expressed:

for example, the integration of the open source Com-

piere ERP and of the Oracle ERP E-Business Suite.

The reason for this choice was to illustrate the integra-

tion of heterogeneous legacy applications in the infor-

mation system. The hardware constraint was implied

by what was available to implement the marketplace.

The second aspect that appeared difﬁcult was the

establishment of the project planning. The hardware

constraints - the dates of delivery of the computers

and virtual machines - forced us to reorganize the ac-

tivities and to modify the priorities on the project. To

do this, three priority levels were deﬁned:

• Level 1 - high priority: the modules that had to be

implemented.

• Level 2 - medium priority: the modules that

seemed required at ﬁrst but that were not needed

for the marketplace to be operational.

• Level 3 - low priority: modules that were not

required but that could be interesting to be inte-

grated.

5 CONCLUSIONS

With the rapid development of Internet technol-

ogy nowadays, B2B e-commerce and collaborative

e-marketplace become quickly growing preoccupa-

tions. Enterprises that solely rely on their own busi-

ness information system, are unable to meet the

rapidly changing business needs, resulting from cor-

porate merger acquisitions and hard competition. En-

terprises must be able to quickly adapt to constantly

changing market needs by providing efﬁcient solu-

tions for information systems integration. This allows

for suppliers and partners to collaborate through the

network with greater efﬁciency. In order to ensure

ﬂexible operations, companies tend to build their IT

systems in accordance with the SOA paradigm and

take advantage of the Web and Semantic Web tech-

nologies. SOA, including the protocols and standards,

thus deﬁnes a new distributed scheme on the Web.

The goal of SOA is to provide a common technol-

ogy layer, which is independent from languages and

platforms. The applications of different platforms

need this technology layer to connect and integrate

with each other. SOA seems to be the right technical

infrastructure to design future collaborative market-

place. In this paper we have discussed, on a practical

example, how SOA can be used to support a collab-

orative e-marketplace composed of a mainly Oracle

based software architecture, but also integrating an

open source ERP. Our architecture and approach is of

course not speciﬁc to Oracle systems and ERPs, but

can easily be adapted to other very different environ-

ments and software systems.

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