Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure stack

Oracle SOA Suite 11g is a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products. Oracle has put in the effort to make this stack robust, extensible, and agile, in part by including some of the best technologies available on the market. Instead of cobbling together enterprise solutions from disparate vendors and products, Oracle SOA Suite 11g provides you with a unified product suite to meet all of your SOA needs. This results in a single design-time experience, single runtime infrastructure, and end-to-end monitoring that greatly simplifies the building, maintenance, and monitoring of distributed SOA implementations.

The following diagram shows how Oracle SOA Suite 11g brings out a seamless integration capability for an enterprise wide SOA adoption and implementation by using an array of standard components suited to achieve a specific business objective:

Here are some points about the Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure stack:

• JDeveloper provides a design and development environment for software developers and architects, using the Oracle SOA Suite 11g to create standards based reusable enterprise software assets.

• Service components can be built as BPEL and/or BPMN processes, business rules and decision components, human task, events and mediator, or a combination thereof. They are the building blocks used to construct SOA composite applications. The service infrastructure, comprising a unified platform for services, processes, and events, provides the internal message transport infrastructure capabilities for connecting service components and enabling data flow. Service engines, such as the BPEL Process Manager Engine, Mediator Engine, and BPM Engine, process messages received |from the service infrastructure.

• Oracle Service Bus provides a framework for lightweight, scalable, and reliable service orchestration designed to connect, mediate, and manage interaction between heterogeneous systems and services. It is widely adopted in all major SOA implementations, and is used to transform protocols and messages between different components.

• Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is used to build interactive real-time dashboards and proactive alerts for monitoring business processes and services, giving business executives and operation managers the information they need to take corrective action, if the business environment changes.

• Oracle Business-to-Business (B2B) Integration enables integration with trading partners by using industry standard protocols such as RossettaNet, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and so on, to provide a solution for establishing online collaborations and automated processes.

• Oracle Complex Event Processing (CEP) provides a mechanism to process multiple event streams to detect patterns and trends in real time, and provide enterprises the necessary visibility via BAM. Oracle CEP is designed to look across discrete event streams to find only the important events/trends within a given time frame, and to detect missing events and events that should have occurred but did not.

• Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM) is used to govern interactions with shared services through security and operational policy management and enforcement to ensure service reuse remains under control. Starting with the Oracle SOA Suite 11g release, OWSM is a component that is built into the suite. Every Oracle SOA Suite 11g domain has this component built-in by default to facilitate the management of web services.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g relies on 100 percent standard integration approaches using BPEL, BPMN, JCA, J2EE, and web services, and hence extending its reach to other service-based and process-centric applications. This makes it highly pluggable with your existing enterprise IT infrastructure. Oracle SOA Suite 11g can be installed to run on any number of standards compliant application servers including Oracle WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere, and Red Hat JBoss, and can run on any number of certified database management systems such as the Oracle Database, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server.

What differentiates Oracle SOA Suite 11g from other comparable products on the market is the consolidation of the stack into a unified service platform that translates into major user benefits. Service Component Architecture (SCA), an emerging standard, is the key enabler here. SCA enables you to manage, version, and deploy components and metadata as a single unit. All artifacts are stored in a single repository, the Metadata Store (MDS). But the story doesn't stop here, Oracle SOA Suite 11g also consolidates all the runtime into a modular architecture of engines plugging into a common service infrastructure. And the engine consolidation naturally leads to a rationalization of the monitoring infrastructure, still maintaining a vendor neutral J2EE platform! All of this translates into numerous design-time, runtime, and monitoring benefits, many of which we will explore throughout this book.