Sunday, May 17, 2015

Don't try using Oracle's Fusion Middleware with Windows FTP. Just don't

I'm writing this out of pure frustration with Oracle's SOA Suite Product.

It's disgraceful and a downright time waster. To avoid sounding like a ranter, the following is a summary of my issues with it.


  1. The absence of a proper debugging environment. If there is, I haven't seen how to use it in any of the documentation I've been looking for about 2 years now. To 'debug' BPEL and Composite Applications I have to rely on the audit trail in  the Enterprise Manager window. That's a cycle of develop, deploy and run on the FMW server for every little change I'd like to test and examine. It doesn't stop there! To see more details about why for example FTP connection is failing, I have to scour the log files - there's no point trying to use the EM GUI for that, it's too unwieldy to make productive sense. 
  2. The combination of Oracle SOA Suite + Oracle Weblogic Server is a memory hungry monster that will eat up all of your precious working memory. 
  3. Deploying other products such as hyperion, essbase is a nightmare! Too many things left to the administrator. Why not just wrap all these up into a proper UI and handle your business. It all gives the feeling that all of the products were hurriedly put together.
  4. Don't try using the FTP Adapter with a windows NT FTP Server. Even when the servertype, listParserType, recentDateFormat etc parameters are properly configured as per http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E12839_01/integration.1111/e10231/adptr_file.htm#BABEDEGC it still doesn't work! And wait, there's no way to properly debug it to find out what's exactly happening and the log files aren't helping much.

P.S. I'm writing this after spending at least 6 hours trying to list files on a windows FTP server from BPEL without success even when the Weblogic/SOA is installed on Windows itself.
The default settings on the FTP Adapter work without issues tho.

Dear Oracle, keep it up

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