Beyond the use of ICS, we have taken the approach of utilizing additional services and tools that are free wherever possible. We will explain in more detail the different tools and services, but let's start by just introducing what is needed:
- An Oracle Cloud account. A trial ICS account will be sufficient for most things (as long as you have tried everything in the book within the trial period obviously).
- Free accounts with apiary (https://apiary.io/) and Mockable (https://www.mockable.io/). We will introduce these in more detail shortly.
- A free edition of SoapUI (https://www.soapui.org/), as we will be using this to initiate many of our use cases. We also make use of Postman (https://www.getpostman.com/) as an alternate option, which can be retrieved freely.
- To follow the book, it will be necessary to look at and make minor changes to the XML Schemas. The changes needed are simple enough that they can be done with a simple text editor, you would rather use your preferred development tool, such as JDeveloper. If you want to use JDeveloper, we would recommend adopting a 12.x version, which can be obtained from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/overview/index.html. There is, of course, the middle ground with tools such as Xsemmel (https://xsemmel.codeplex.com/) as an open source option, or the market-leading XMLSpy (http://www.altova.com/).
- A copy of the schemas and related resources that go with this book. These can be found via the Packt website or via the author's own site at https://oracle-integration.cloud.
- The CURL command-line tool to allow us to make simple calls to the ICS API (https://curl.haxx.se/).
- VirtualBox is a freely available desktop style virtualization tool and is used to help quickly create an environment in which we can run the Oracle agent technology (https://www.virtualbox.org/).
Several of the chapters also make use of additional external services to demonstrate some of the features such as file-level integration and social web services. To demonstrate such capabilities, we have created accounts with the following services. To follow these chapters, you may wish to do them. The services are as follows:
- Google (https://console.developers.google.com/)
- Salesforce (https://developer.salesforce.com/)
- TimeDB (https://timezonedb.com)
- Twitter (https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api)
- Trello (https://trello.com/)
- Oracle Messaging Cloud Service (https://cloud.oracle.com/messaging)
This book is intended for web developers with no knowledge of WebStorm yet, but who are experienced in JavaScript, Node.js, HTML, and CSS, and reasonably familiar with frameworks such as AngularJS and Meteor.
To be able to describe, work with, and simulate (mock) web services that use the REST paradigm (explained in Chapter 1, Introducing the Concepts and Terminology) easily and in a way that reflects the sort of integrations you are likely to build with ICS, we have chosen to use Apiary.io (although there are other services on the Internet that offer similar capabilities). We chose Apiary.io as Oracle are developing a closer relationship with apiary with other products, so it may be possible that Oracle will develop its ecosystem for ICS to further incorporate apiary in the future. Apiary also offers a pricing model that allows you to get started without any additional expenditure.
Cloud services that offer support for SOAP mocking are limited, in part as REST is overtaking SOAP as a more popular way to provide web services and define them using definition syntaxes such as Blueprint and Swagger. We have adopted Mockable.io for this book – driven by its ease of use and simplicity and again free startup model.
When you first start using ICS, you will use Oracle's cloud managed website, which will allow to select the service(s) that you want and configure users. In this book, we have deliberately chosen not to write about this process so that we can concentrate on the application of ICS, which generally will be of greater value to you, we believe. The process of managing users is relatively simple. In addition to this, both Oracle and their partners will surely assist any customers in managing environment setup as it is in their interests to see customers using their services successfully.