Auto-Generate Oracle APIs

For most organizations, legacy integration is a slow, arduous, costly, and often risky process. When devising their digital transformation strategy, decision-makers in the vast majority of organizations think about converting or rewriting their legacy systems.

But what if there were a way to leverage your legacy assets to quickly and easily deliver digital services, without the need for painstaking integration projects that drag on for months?

OpenLegacy pioneered a unique approach to the problem of bridging the gap between legacy backend systems and digital applications. Rather than looking at legacy systems and applications as a problem, we created a solution that opens up the backend systems and enables organizations to preserve the investment and mitigate time, cost, security, and risk.

Our robust solution — the OpenLegacy integration platform — allows you to leverage the data and application logic within your legacy systems and use it to generate microservice-based APIs automatically. Most Oracle integration solutions focus on data, but not on business logic. OpenLegacy allows access to both types, saving a substantial amount of valuable time.

In this article, we’ll go over a few common Oracle backend system challenges, and show you how OpenLegacy can help you solve them.

Exposing Oracle stored procedures

Traditionally, exposing a PL/SQL (Stored Procedure) required a number of manual steps. Although the steps varied depending on the actual PL/SQL and database combination, exposing Store Procedures was an arduous and time-consuming task.

The Stored Procedure was wrapped by a proprietary Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework) business component. Then you created an XML Schema and relied on an XML process to actually access the ADF business component.

This means exposing Oracle stored procedures as digital services typically results in adding more layers, increasing the complexity of your application. It also leads to heavy reliance on proprietary tools, increasing your organization’s technical debt.

Building the ADF Business Service, following the standard “Rules,” involved multiple manual steps, like:

• Creating a Domain layer for Entity Objects
• Defining View Objects
• Defining Query Objects
• Defining business rules and validation
• Binding Business Services with User Interfaces
• And so on

Oracle ADF has an extremely layered architecture. Even if your developers have the specialized skills necessary to expose Oracle stored procedures, it could take weeks. If not, you were reliant on external consultants to come in and build things, as well as continuously pay them for maintenance. Either way, this approach results in more proprietary vendor lock-in.

A possible workaround would be using an SOA binding component, but you’d often run into issues with handling data and database schema changes. Although you could create a service on top of the Stored Procedure, you would often run into various security issues.

In other words, even the workaround had restrictions and limitations, and would severely impact the ability to account for changes in the underlying database. Organizations would end up with undocumented message flows, raising a myriad of maintenance concerns. The biggest issue was that even a small change in the database would cause the whole message train to stop.

Ultimately, both the “approved” process and the workaround resulted in a brittle solution. Both approaches take hundreds of hours, multiple developer teams, multiple checkpoints, manual coding, and manual testing.

Generate Oracle APIs Automatically

OpenLegacy offers a much better alternative. With our integration platform, a single Java developer can generate APIs from Oracle stored procedures. Our platform supports many types of databases, giving you the advantage of having a unified process to access the data and application logic stored in all of them.

OpenLegacy uses API connectors to pull data directly from your legacy systems — databases, midrange systems, and mainframes — allowing automatic generation and deployment of APIs in a few easy steps, without making changes to your existing infrastructure.

Here’s a short video that shows how OpenLegacy simplifies API creation for Oracle while working within a Microsoft toolchain.

https://www.openlegacy.com/democenter/how-to-build-a-microsoft-flow-connector-and-application-with-cics-mainframe-bing-and-oracle

See how one of our clients uses OpenLegacy to drive the digital transformation of their Oracle systems

The best way to understand just how big of an impact embracing the OpenLegacy approach can have on your business is to see how our platform helped other organizations with Oracle DBs solve their integration challenges.

JSW improves performance with real-time error tracking

An interesting case study comes from JSW, India’s largest private steel manufacturer, which relies on a myriad of machines of various types, spread out across many manufacturing plants. Each machine has multiple sensors supplying event data every few seconds. The data is saved in each machine’s database, in a proprietary manufacturer format, and then transferred to the JSW central Oracle database.

Although the process worked, it lacked a critical feature — error reporting and handling. The OpenLegacy integration platform helped them automatically generate microservice-based APIs that sped up the data transfer between all the different machines, the central Oracle database and their cloud-based SAP Quality Control module.

This enabled earlier error detection and led to improved performance and cost savings. For the full story, read our case study to see how the company improved performance with real-time error tracking, using the OpenLegacy platform.

Learn more about OpenLegacy and discover how you can fast track your organization’s digital transformation!