Oracle Service Bus, first impressions

Professionally I consider myself a lucky person. Quite often when I start working on a new (to me) project I get a chance to learn something new: people, techniques, a product, or some technology.

Since beginning of December 2011 I joined a team that is using quite a lot of different Oracle products. One of the products is Oracle Service Bus formerly known as AquaLogic Service Bus. I have not got a chance to work with it before so I took the opportunity to look at it closely.

Oracle Service Bus is really a shiny product that perfectly fits Oracle's SOA strategy and blah-blah-blah standards-based blah-blah-blah mission critical blah-blah-blah and blah-blah-blah. Blah-blah.


Hmmm, does anybody really believe this?!


When I was younger I was naive. Working with something I often thought: "This is baaad. I can't wait to finish this and move on. Next project will be better. Nothing can be worse than this".

Those times are long gone. I know that no matter how strange or convoluted the current project is the next most likely will be no better. The only thing left is a bit of curiosity: one never knows what kind of SNAFU du jour one comes into. But looking at OSB old memories come back. Can anything actually be worse than this?

I started writing down my impressions but researching something on OSB I came across this post. If you ever get a chance to use OSB go read it and be prepared.

The post reflects my experience with OSB and it has more information than I collected so far. Moreover the author expresses itself much more politely than I wanted to.

I am not sure if everything in that post is up to date. After all the post is like a year and a half old, so things might have improved. But do not hold your breath.

There are also some things I have experienced but they are not mentioned in the referenced post. The most amusing one is lack of undo in IDE (Eclipse with a lot of Oracle's plugins). Come on Oracle, it is 2012. No undo? Seriously, how much worse it can get? You can only do mouse-driven development in OSB. You do not want even see their XML, trust me, let alone edit it by hand. And it is really easy to mess something up with a wrong mouse move. Even changing some property or expression has no possibility of undo.


My advice? Maximize your return on investment, stay away from Oracle Service Bus.

And if you are not convinced, read on.