Thursday, June 26, 2014

SOA Suite 12c: Introducing the REST Adapter

The REST Adapter is an important new feature of Oracle SOA Suite 12c. This new adapter allows easy calling/exposing of RESTful services (see http://javaoraclesoa.blogspot.nl/2014/05/what-is-rest.html for an introduction to REST) based on a WADL or configured manually. Not only does Oracle introduce the REST Adapter, but JSON support is also added in SOA Suite 12c. These features will greatly increase the integration options and flexibility of Oracle SOA Suite. In this blog I'll describe how a RESTful service can be called by using the REST adapter. Exposing a RESTful service will be described in a later blog.

SOA Suite 12c: RESTAdapter: Exposing and testing RESTful services

In my previous two blog posts I have described REST (here) and how the new Oracle SOA Suite 12c REST adapter can be used to call RESTful services (here). I recommend those articles to be read first if you're new to REST in order to better understand this article.

The newly introduced Oracle SOA Suite 12c REST adapter provides options for calling RESTful services but it can also be used to expose RESTful services. These exposed services can use XML or JSON as message exchange format. As described in the previous blog post, JSON support is implemented by implementing NXSD (Native Format Builder schema definition files, more information here) to describe the JSON message and make the transformation to and from XML possible. This XML can then be used as usual by the different components in a composite.