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Is WCF good option to expose services to Oracle Service Bus

Our company has an Oracle Service Bus Architecture(OSB). My department needs to expose few services to this OSB which will be later consumed by different applications across different departments and technologies. I have 7-8 applications and all are Microsoft-based (VB6, C#, SQL Server). My question is whether WCF is a good option to develop our data-based services? Does it integrate well with the OSB? Are there any integration issues? What is the best practice and what transport protocol for wcf should be used in this scenario?

Solution

  • I've been involved in successful projects that have integrated WCF with OSB, using SOAP/HTTP as the transport protocol.

    From previous experience, two key risks to avoid:

    1. Architectural delineation - you'll need to sort out where the orchestration is going to live, given that both frameworks have support for it, and WCF has all sorts of weird and wacky features that can provide performance benefits.
    2. Security integration - while both frameworks provide implementations of common security standards, my experience a couple of years back was that they did NOT play well together.

    If the approach is WCF to provide the data integration, and OSB to provide the central point of access and enforcement (along with integration possibly) then fantastic. That's a clear line in the sand.