Oracle SOA(Service Oriented Architecture ) Suite

Welcome to Oracle SOA Suite

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a collection of standards-based software products that spans a range of tools and services from J2EE and developer tools, to integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. Oracle Fusion Middleware offers complete support for development, deployment, and management.

Oracle SOA Suite is an essential middleware layer of Oracle Fusion Middleware. It provides a complete set of service infrastructure components for designing, deploying, and managing composite applications. Oracle SOA Suite enables services to be created, managed, and orchestrated into composite applications and business processes. Composites enable you to easily assemble multiple technology components into one SOA composite application. Oracle SOA Suite plugs into heterogeneous IT infrastructures and enables enterprises to incrementally adopt SOA.

 

Introduction to Service-Oriented Architecture

Changing markets, increasing competitive pressures, and evolving customer needs are placing greater pressure on IT to deliver greater flexibility and speed. Today, every organization is faced with predicting change in a global business environment, to rapidly respond to competitors, and to best exploit organizational assets for growth. In response to these challenges, leading companies are adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) to deliver on these requirements by overcoming the complexity of their application and IT environments..

SOA provides an enterprise architecture that supports building connected enterprise applications to provide solutions to business problems. SOA facilitates the development of enterprise applications as modular business web services that can be easily integrated and reused, creating a truly flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure. You can move and reconfigure pieces, turning your systems into the IT equivalent of Lego blocks.

 

Goal of Service-Oriented Architecture

 

Increasingly fragmented and complex infrastructures are limiting IT's ability to deliver on business needs. Many organizations have inherited disjointed legacy systems and packaged applications, a large proportion of which were never designed for information interoperability, integration, and reuse. The result of this is that most of the IT budget goes into maintenance of the current IT infrastructure and only a small amount is available for new functionalities to drive new business opportunities. The major portion of budget for new capabilities goes into the cost of integrating new functionality into the existing systems that offer poor support for interoperability.

Traditionally, business information systems have been developed with a functional orientation often resulting in silos of information. The fundamental problem with this approach is that end-to-end business processes, which span silos, are not adaptable to change as business needs evolve. The processes become fragmented and embedded deep within systems. Enterprise application integration (EAI) and other traditional middleware solutions partially address this by enabling systems to communicate with each other, but they do not fully solve the problem. Their ability to create cross application business processes is inadequate, and they allow only limited business process adaptability. Moreover, these traditional solutions come at a high cost. The majority of EAI and traditional middleware solutions use proprietary technology, which causes dependency on specialized skills and to that single vendor's products. In addition, the systems become tightly coupled, so if an interface change occurs in one system, all other systems need to be adjusted. Not only does the technology make it difficult to make changes, it can become cost-prohibitive to do so.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) helps address the fragmented IT landscape and addresses the difficulties associated with silos of IT infrastructure and applications.

Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite

 

The components of Oracle SOA Suite benefit from common capabilities, including a single deployment, management, and tooling model, end-to-end security, and unified metadata management. Oracle SOA Suite is unique in that it provides the following set of integrated capabilities:

• Messaging
• Service discovery
• Orchestration
• Web services management and security
• Business rules
• Events framework
• Business activity monitoring

These capabilities help address the fragmented IT landscape and addresses the difficulties associated with silos of IT infrastructure and applications. It enables greater flexibility through:

• Interoperability: SOA, and the industry standards underpinning it, enable existing siloed applications to interoperate seamlessly and in an easier-to-maintain manner than any traditional EAI solution.
• Increased reuse: Once legacy systems and applications are service enabled, these services can be reused, which results in reduced ongoing development costs and results in reduced time to market. Further, business processes built as an orchestration of services can also be exposed as services, further increasing reuse.
• More agile business processes: SOA reduces the gap between the business process model and implementation. This enables changes to business processes already implemented as orchestrations of services to be easily captured and implemented.
• Improved visibility: SOA can give improved business visibility by enabling business capabilities exposed as services, and the status of in-flight business processes automated with business activity monitoring, to be rapidly integrated into service-enabled enterprise portals, aiding business decision-making.
• Reduced maintenance costs: SOA development encourages duplicated overlapping business capabilities (services) that span multiple applications and systems to be consolidated into a small number of shared services. SOA development enables elimination of redundant services and reduces the cost of maintaining systems by providing a single point of change for application logic. Further, SOA gives IT the means to gradually phase out legacy systems and applications, while minimizing disruption to the applications that are built on or are integrated with them using SOA principles. This process frees up funds for new projects.
• Compliance and governance: By realizing better and more standardized operational procedures, SOA provides the basis for a comprehensive security solution, and enables better visibility into business operations and exception conditions.

 

Oracle SOA Suite Standards

Oracle SOA Suite puts a strong emphasis on standards and interoperability. Among the standards it leverages are:

• The Service Component Architecture (SCA) assembly model abstracts the implementation and allows assembly of components, with little implementation details. SCA enables you to represent business logic as reusable service components that can be easily integrated into any SCA-compliant application. The resulting application is known as a SOA composite application. The specification for the SCA standard is maintained by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
• Service Data Objects (SDO) provide a data programming architecture. It provides a standardized view on data, and provides efficient transportation, as well as change capture, in form of a change summary. More specifically, it collects a data graph of related business objects, called DataObjects. This graph tracks the schema that describes the DataObjects. Knowledge is not required about how to access a particular back-end data source to use SDO in a SOA composite application. Consequently, you can use static or dynamic programming styles and obtain connected and disconnected access.
• Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) provides enterprises with an industry standard for business process orchestration and execution. Using BPEL, you design a business process that integrates a series of discrete services into an end-to-end process flow. This integration reduces process cost and complexity.
• XSL Transformations (XSLT) processes XML documents and transforms document data from one XML schema to another.
• Java Connector Architecture (JCA) provides a Java technology solution to the problem of connectivity between the many application servers in Enterprise Information Systems (EIS).
• Java Messaging Service (JMS) provides a messaging standard that allows application components based on the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) to access business logic distributed among heterogeneous systems.
• Web Service Description Language (WSDL) file provides a standardized view on the capabilities of a service. Bindings provide the entry points into the composite at runtime.
• SOAP over HTTP (SOAP) provides the default network protocol for message delivery.