Business services are operations that benefit a company but do not produce a tangible good. Companies use business services to outsource labor that falls outside their area of expertise or capability. For example, a construction business may contract with a company to complete renovations on its facility. This frees the construction firm to focus on its specific aims and allows it to save money by outsourcing labor that doesn’t require its specific skills. Business services can also help with other tasks, such as marketing and inter-departmental communication.
A company’s customers can influence operational processes and even affect the cost and quality of a service. For example, a customer who takes a long time at a fast food counter might slow down the line for everyone behind him. Similarly, an architect might make or break the success of a new building design. While these examples may be extreme, they illustrate the impact of customers’ decisions on a business’s bottom line.
When a business service fails to process a request, it can retry the message by using another endpoint URI. The order in which it tries the other endpoints can be configured by setting up retry policies on the General tab of the Business Service Definition Editor. There are several retry policies available, including round-robin, random, and random-weighted. In the round-robin retry policy, the service attempts the endpoints in a rotating order. If the retry fails, the next endpoint is tried. The service continues retrying the endpoints until it succeeds or the retry count is exhausted.
The General tab of the Business Service Definition Editor displays information about a business service, such as its name, transport, and WSDL port or binding. You can modify this information by clicking the Edit button. You can also enable result caching on this tab to improve performance. See Enabling Business Service Result Caching for instructions.
You can secure business services through multiple methods, including Oracle Web Services Manager (WSM) policies and access control at the transport level. See Securing Business and Proxy Services.
You can create business services through the Business Service Wizard in JDeveloper or through the Service Bus Overview Editor in the JCA console. Both methods let you create a business service from either a WSDL-based or a transport-typed service. In addition, both the wizard and the editor allow you to generate business services from a JCA adapter. The resulting business service can be used by the adapter to receive and send messages. Depending on the type of business service, you can configure properties that determine how the service handles message contents, such as MTOM/XOP support and MIME attachments. You can also set up the XQuery version to use and specify whether binary data is included in outbound messages.