Proxy Service & Business Service

Question

Can i use a proxy service without a business service while configuring message flows in Oracle service bus? If so is what scenarios would we use it?

Answer 1

You can create a proxy service that does not use a business service.

Some reasons for such an approach is to create a common proxy module that is used by other proxy services that may do some common message processing before forwarding to a business service.

Answer 2

I think you cannot create a proxy service without a business service call in OSB, but you can call dummy business services that publish on a JMS topic that nobody listens on. This kind of proxy service could implement data transformation (e.g. XSLT) between the request and response, or enrich the response with data retrieved from a lookup table (fn-bea:execute-sql()).
A service bus, like OSB is meant to provide a façade to back-end (business) services: route to and compose existing services. What you are asking for is to create new back-end services which is more suited for Java EE servers or Oracle BPEL.

Update: You can create stand-alone proxy service, if you use pipeline pair and stage, but no route steps.

Answer 3

You can create a proxy service without a business service. A simple scenario is suppose you want to fetch the data from the queue, could be jms or mq, and you don't want to do anything with that data. You just simply want to empty the queue and do not want to store the message. In this case, your purpose can be fulfilled by simply creating a proxy service.