Keeping up to date

When it comes to IT, things develop and change at a tremendous rate and cloud services are likely to increase this tempo. The thing that impacted the rate of change was the speed by which customers could apply updates. Vendors do not want to upset customers by changing so quickly that, as soon as they have deployed the latest edition, there is already another version released. Not only do you want to avoid frustrating users with the tempo of deploying updates, but also, as a software vendor, you do not want to be trying to support too many versions of a product. All of this disappears when offered as a cloud service, as the vendor will be conducting the updates for you. As the vendor has control of the deployment of updates, they can keep everyone up-to date, simplifying things for them. This means that we will see a heightened arms race by  cloud providers. This is great for us as customers, as we will see more and more capability in the short term; but for us as authors, and Packt as our publisher, it risks this book appearing to date quickly.

To help with this, the book has dealt with stuff that is unlikely to change much, so you may find that elements of capability appear to be missing. So how do you find out about how to get the most of these newer features? Well, the authors have committed to having their own site to support this book, which can be found at http://oracle-integration.cloud. As things evolve, the authors will endeavor to write articles about the new capabilities added, plus reference known resources that we are aware of.

This does not mean that the only point of information is the book's website. Oracle provides a raft of channels for information. Not only that, Oracle support a number of community channels where you can go find information and ask questions. This is all in addition to the more formal channels that Oracle offers, such as the formal support (http://support.oracle.com), account management team, and so on. You might consider also exploiting the information at:

In addition to ICS related resources, you may be interested in knowing about, the following resources look at broader integration concepts and techniques that can be used with ICS or any other integration capability, for example SOA CS:

  • Within IT the idea of patterns has been around for a while and the various areas of IT have developed their own catalogs of patterns. In the integration space the definitive source is the Enterprise Integration Patterns book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolfe. The book has a website (http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com) to go with it, that contains the essential pattern information, but if you want more explanation and detail then you will need the book. If you are going to be creating a lot of integrations then having the book maybe worthwhile. But, a word of warning, it is not a book for reading from cover to cover.
  • Going beyond the Hohpe and Woolfe material into broader design considerations that impact integration are the books by Thomas Erl published/associated with Arcitura which is Erl's training company. These books have been published through Addison Wesley. The books from Erl cover a wide range of related technologies from web services to cloud and typically each aspect has a concepts/principles and a patterns book, with supporting website. The most directly relevant of these is SOA Patterns (http://SOAPatterns.org). These texts are a lot more abstract and architectural in view point, so do not expect them to provide detailed implementation guidance. But they are leading texts in these subject areas.

In addition to providing information about developments on ICS and its capabilities, the authors will seek to also provide a catalog of potentially helpful sites to help with a deeper understanding of the standards ICS supports such as SOAP and WSDL, but also web-based tools that will also help with development activities. There is no doubt that purely cloud-based tooling is still developing, so we shall seek to keep a list of sites and tools that may help you going forwards updated.

In terms of broader technical resources that may help you in the future:

  • World Wide Web Consortium (best known as W3C) is the standards body that has driven the development of many of the central web standards we use today covering things like SOAP, WSDL among many. All the information can be seen at https://www.w3.org/.
  • Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is another key standards organization. Some of the web standards have been developed in conjunction with other organizations such as the W3C for example HTTP. It should be noted, that the IETF documentation does tend to be very textual and specification driven with limited elaboration. In addition to HTTP, the IETF also have the SMTP (standard underpinning e-mail). The IETF site is at https://www.ietf.org/.
  • Whilst REST is not a standard, there are a number of standards as you will have seen in the book covering the description of APIs that utilize REST including:
  • W3Schools is a good reference site for many of the web and XML standards, providing quick reference and illustrations of simple, common applications of the standards such as XSLT, HTML, XSD, and so on, http://www.w3schools.com/.
  • When it comes to the APIs to other applications, whilst the ICS adapter will simplify much of the work, it is worth being able to refer to the originating provider and their API definitions, as this will provide access to rich additional information on what the data represents, and can go as far as providing test tools to help establish the expected behavior as you will have seen mentioned in the book.

In addition to this of course, there a broad range of Packt books and online educational material available at https://www.packtpub.com.

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