A Helidon Flight: Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform
Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) is a cloud-native integration solution for the hospitality industry, enabling hotels and vendors to connect applications to Oracle OPERA Cloud, the leading Property Management System (PMS), for fast development and easy collaboration.
Featuring a self-service model for hospitality industry software developers to discover, use, and publish REST and GraphQL APIs, OHIP is implemented with fully stateless and independently deployable microservices running in Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure — in an evolution from a previous application server -based implementation.
The microservices handling OHIP’s Developer Portal are built with Helidon, the simple and fast open-source Java microservices library from Oracle.
Helidon powers other important microservices in the OHIP architecture beyond the Developer Portal. The Business Events Publisher in Oracle Hospitality Cloud Suite, pushing events in real time (between bounded contexts in domain-driven design, with a circuit breaker pattern), is a microservice built in Helidon. The Billing component is a Helidon microservice. The Automated Provisioning, as well, is done with Helidon. The system is currently handling over 2,000 requests per hour.
“When we started the project around 2019, we were looking at using Java, and we wanted to adopt a modern approach and microservices. Obviously, Helidon was designed for that. We just adopted it as the Java framework we were going to use. It does what we need, and it’s been very good.” — Martin Hall, Senior Manager, Software Development, Oracle Hospitality Global Business Unit
The OHIP team chose Helidon SE, the reactive edition of Helidon, for fast reactive pure Java microservices with special architectures in some cases. The other edition, Helidon MP, implements the Eclipse MicroProfile specification, enabling a more declarative, annotation-driven, component-based programming model. As more existing Opera Cloud services are refactored to a microservices architecture, new APIs that are built from scratch in Java (including an API for APIs, and a shipboard PMS for the cruise ship industry) will be built with Helidon, according to Luis Weir, Senior Director, Integrations and APIs Strategy, Oracle Hospitality Global Business Unit.
OHIP integrates with several services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Several services use Oracle Autonomous Database, with a Pluggable Database per service pattern. The platform also uses OAuth with OpenID Connect via Oracle Identity Cloud Service.
OHIP’s experience has shown that its architecture, powered by Helidon, is delivering important business benefits in the areas of marketplace access, monetization models, solution speed to market, cost to customers, and scalability and security, in Mr. Weir’s estimation.
Readers are encouraged to stay tuned, and watch this space, for more Helidon Flight success stories in this series.
