Remote Connectivity Made Easy – App to App Interface in Oracle EBS

With the growing demands of data in the enterprises, there are multiple applications being used for various purposes to achieve end user requirements. When there are several applications being used, there arises the need for connecting all of them irrespective of their platform, language or server location etc.

Web Services can be SOAP/ REST. SOAP uses XML for all messages, REST can use even smaller message formats that makes communication faster. In this chapter, let us discuss about the REST Webservice that is recommended by Oracle for providing interoperability between remote systems/ applications.

REST is Representational State Transfer. It is an architectural style that specifies uniform interface to enable services to connect different systems over the Web. It is a client/ server architecture and is designed to use HTTP Protocol. Data and Functionality are considered as resources. So client and servers exchanges these resources using the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).

A Web Service that uses REST is called REST or RESTful Web Services. It is a collection of open protocols and standards for exchanging data. RESTful services are fast, simple and lightweight. It supports XML and JSON formats which is smaller in size. It is describes in WADL (Web Application Description Language) and no expensive tools are required to interact with the Web Service. It can be learned quickly by developers and no extensive processing is required. Having said all this, the implementation of REST service is definitely simpler as compared to SOAP. But REST is not a standard and its implementation varies to suit different application needs

Most businesses using Oracle EBS have other applications that have to interact with the ERP system. Data transfer to and from EBS system is required for efficient interfacing of data and also to have the different applications in sync with each other.

To enable EBS system to effectively communicate with each other, Oracle has provided the ISG (Integrated SOA Gateway) from 12.1 version for consuming SOAP based Web Services. From EBS 12.2.3, ISG has been enhanced as an infrastructure to provide and consume REST based services.

REST API uses the HTTP protocol that has the following operations/ methods:

·         DELETE – deletes a resource

·         PUT – creates a new resource

·         GET – retrieves the current state of the resource

·         POST – transfers a new data onto a resource

EBS uses PL/SQL API for POST operations and JAVA API for GET operations. Applications and their features exchange data and information through defined APIs. EBS business functionality/ data can be exposed to the remote system irrespective of the platform or the language of the originating application. This helps to query data as well as write data to and from the remote data sources

The REST API breaks down a transaction to create a series of small modules. Each module addresses a particular underlying part of the transaction.

REST Web Service provide a common data access layer that can be accessed from any platform and can be called from your Web browser. It is highly scalable, supports caching and is light weight.

It being stateless reducecs the overhead and complexity of the server. These web services are recommended by Oracle to develop custom mobile apps for Oracle EBS applications.