Managing SOA composite lifecycles

Every SOA composite has a state, mode, and associated metadata. The state can be up (started) or down (shut down). The mode can either be active or retired. Metadata is stored in the Metadata Store (MDS), which is generally a database-backed repository used by Oracle SOA Suite 12c, and consists of information that includes the default revision number, last modification date, deployment and redeployment times, and instance runtime information. Before walking through how to manage the state and mode of SOA composites, we will begin by describing composite revisions.

Understanding revisions

When a HelloWorld composite is deployed to on the server, a revision is required during the deployment. Thus, a service's WSDL can be accessed via a URL similar to the following, clearly indicating a revision of 1.0 after the composite name:

http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld!1.0/HelloWorld.wsdl

However, there may be a case where a new version of the...