Recent Posts by Angelo Santagata

Introduction In my Developing SaaS Extensions using VBCS and Helidon Micro-Services part 1, I focused on the creation of a Helidon based microservice which we tested locally. This blog post takes the reading through to the next step which is to deploy the microservice on Oracle Kubernetes Service and then explain how this service can be called from VBCS in a way that the microservice is aware of the user (aka identity propagation from VBCS to the microservice) In the example...

Introduction I recently completed a blog post on how to extend Oracle SaaS using VBCS and Oracle Functions and am in the process of publishing the code. Whilst I was writing this piece of code I learnt a lot about Functions and ran into many situations which I think a lot of other developers would run into . This blog post collates them into a single blog post (which I may update regularly) and Im hoping it is useful to you all. How to expose Functions as REST Services Functions...

Introduction Whilst building a demo recently I had to store an oAuth client secret somewhere for Oracle Function to work properly. I immediately decided to store it in the Oracle Functions configurations section and thought all was well. The below image shows the configuration section for my application and as you can see both the IDCS client id and client secret are stored. However after a security review with my good friend (Olaf) we realised that whilst the data is relatively...

Introduction As businesses adopt more SaaS, the ability to extend to meet changing business requirements becomes more important.  Before cloud-native, IT teams were faced with the realities of either selecting a set of vendors offered integration solutions, providing simplistic use cases, or setting up rather large stacks of infrastructures to support their more complex use-cases. Cloud-native introduces capabilities such as containers, and serverless functions. By using these...

Introduction This blog post details how you can develop a SaaS extension using VBCS and Helidon microservices and most importantly pass the user identity from the SaaS to the microservice so it can be used for data security etc. In a previous blog post of mine I commented that whilst VBCS can be used directly against Oracle SaaS, and it works very well BTW, it is often recommended that you build a backend service to manage the interaction between SaaS and PaaS.  This can be...

Performance Tips In this last blog post we explore one of the most important topics of any project which is performance. It is also worth highlighting that performance is an iterative process where the first data point you must define is the performance goal. Once you have the performance goal defined you can then start to benchmark your performance baseline (ie what its like at this point in time), After this you can proceed to tweak your code, then benchmark the result at...

When building a VBCS application you will almost always be connecting to a data source and one question you will almost certainly ask yourself is ” do I need a middle tier to access the data source, SaaS in our case has APIs, or can I, should I go directly?” The answer to the question depends on many factors: Does the SaaS Service expose a REST API? Does the REST API meet your needs? Does the REST API support data security so that if a user bypassed the webUI no harm would be...

VBCS strictly speaking only supports REST APIs so accessing the database via SQL*Net is not possible. To access the data in the Database from VBCS you will need to create a REST Façade to access your data in the database.   To achieve this we we have a number of options available to us including : Oracle REST Data Service (ORDS) A 3GL facade using Java, JavaScript etc Oracle Integration Cloud 1. Oracle REST Data Service (ORDS) This is a nice and easy REST data service which runs on...

In this second part of this blog series we explore some of the patterns we have seen in getting data into Oracle VBCS. Oracle VBCS strictly speaking consumes REST APIs and our Fusion SaaS also supports REST APIs but sometimes we either don’t have access to the REST APIs (e.g because they don’t exist, because they don’t exist or are performance constrained). Depending on the usecase at hand you can choose to either query the data directly or via some of the many bulk apis...