Thanks for your comment and illumination of your experiences. No I’ve never used the EJB3 transport for an OSB business service. I’m currently working on what is basically a messaging solution with OSB components to do some transformation of messages read off topics. So our deployment looks like some JMS queues and topics with a couple of components putting messages into them, a big chunk of Java – several EJB3 MDBs with a bunch of POJO in the middle – and another OSB component getting the result off a JMS topic and using Xpath transforms to send the message onto an external web service.

We’ve found you have to have installations of OSB and even SOA Suite in separate middleware homes in a Dev environment. There’s so many moving parts and potential conflicts of sub-components it can just drive you crazy at times. Best to just make sure you’ve got the versions that Oracle says to use.

I read your Oracle 11G installation experiences with sadness, agreement and amusement

After returning to Brisbane after some time off overseas, and as a way of refreshing my Oracle product knowledge, I just did my version of the OSB 11G OSB install process. I have spent a long time with BEA products including a good two plus years with ALSB/OSB. BEA products used to be such a straight-forward install.

Of course, I did something slightly different from one of the large number of sanctioned install paths described in ugly detail in the documentation. I used the separate Helios version of OEPE. (oepe-helios-all-in-one-11.1.1.6.0.201007221419-win32) It is installed in the correct location in Oracle/Middleware.

In the version that you installed, have you successfully tested creating an OSB Business Service (end-point) using the new EJB 3 transport? I’m getting an error within Eclipse on the EJB Transport Configuration. So,Mr Google has lead me to your blog.

The error I’m getting is reported at the top for the EJB Configuration Tab (and hence not a ‘normal’ error) as ‘Generate: Error during generation of the WSDL. Cannot run program “null//modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin/ant.bat”: CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified.’

The ant.bat file is present in the listed location.

In normal circumstances I would treat this as either an installation bug or that I’m using incompatible software components. e.g. In this case, the fact that the version of Eclipse Helios/ OEPE is more recent than OSB is a candidate for incompatibility.

Since a) I’m just Joe IT Architect, and not currently a customer and hence not of interest to Oracle Support, and b) have been through the install process twice with the same result, AND c) the install of OSB seems to apply updates to both OEPE and WLS installs, which implies I’d have to do it all again using oepe-galileo-all-in-one-11.1.1.5.0.201003170852-win32.zip.

Regardless, to extend your observations on the ordeal of the OSB install process, this set of interdependencies and the overlapping of installs is going to be a major problem moving forward.

Now I know Oracle would like Eclipse to disappear and be replaced by JDeveloper but… I can’t see any way that the current Eclipse OEPE can be updated to a later version of Eclipse without a re-install of both WLS and OSB.

i.e. How would one migrate from the Galileo OEPE to the Helios OEPE. So I test some options.

I first tried to see if I could manually adjust with the Galileo Eclipse configuration to match Helios. The necessary plug-ins are actually installed into the OSB sub directory. I found it just too complicated to find the necessary bits to update.

Next, I tried the Oracle Universal Installer from the Start Manu item hoping that maybe it had an update existing install option. It started a command session and then exited with a helpful dialog along the lines of “Command line argument invalid”

Ok, I decide to execute the Oracle Uninstall Service Bus from the Start Menu, also hoping that it might have an update install. But no, what the first tab (Uninstall Oracle Home !) tells me is that if I remove Oracle Service Bus, this will render the Application Server in this home unusable. Since Oracle proudly proclaims the virtues of this central Middleware Home, it probably implies that installs of other products like (say) JDeveloper and SOA Suite are probably also rendered unusable.

So some serious testing of how this software environment will be managed in the real world would need to be carried out before attempting to migrate from an earlier version of WLS/OSB. Currently, this doesn’t look workable from my perspective.