1 Overview of Oracle SOA Suite

This chapter describes Oracle SOA Suite architecture, including key concepts, components, management tools and processes, and process flows.

This chapter includes the following sections:

1.1 About Oracle SOA Suite

Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive, hot-pluggable software suite that enables you to build, deploy, and manage integrations using service-oriented architecture (SOA). Oracle SOA Suite provide the following capabilities:

  • Consistent tooling

  • A single deployment and management model

  • End-to-end security

  • Unified metadata management

Oracle SOA Suite enables you to transform complex application integrations into agile and reusable service-based applications to shorten the time to market, respond faster to business requirements, and lower costs. Critical business services, such as customer, financial, ordering information, and others that were previously accessible only in packaged application user interfaces can now be rapidly modeled for mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets.

Figure 1-1 provides an overview of Oracle SOA Suite architecture.

Figure 1-1 Oracle SOA Suite Architecture

Description of Figure 1-1 follows
Description of "Figure 1-1 Oracle SOA Suite Architecture"

1.2 Key Concepts

Oracle SOA Suite's hot-pluggable architecture enables businesses to reduce costs through reuse of existing IT investments and assets, regardless of the operating system on which they run or the technology on which they are built. Oracle SOA Suite provides easy-to-use, reusable, and unified application development tooling and life cycle management support to further reduce development and maintenance costs and complexity. Businesses can improve efficiency and agility through rules-driven, business process automation with Oracle SOA Suite. Oracle SOA Suite's ability to deliver real-time trending and analysis, visualization, and life cycle visibility enables businesses to anticipate and respond to change when it matters. Oracle SOA Suite provides the following capabilities:

  • Unifies cloud applications with on-premises applications to minimize complexity.

  • Leverages existing functionality for rapid mobile enabling with representational state transfer (REST) support.

  • Designs SOA composite applications from disparate services and applications.

  • Connects to virtually any data source technology (messaging, database, and so on), application, or trading partner through a unified connectivity framework, including adapters and B2B gateways, and preintegration with Oracle Data Integration Suite.

  • Routes, transforms, and virtualizes services through the highly scalable Oracle Service Bus.

  • Orchestrates and builds process automation with Oracle BPEL Process Manager.

  • Builds agility by externalizing specific blocks of logic using Oracle Business Rules.

  • Performs real-time detection of specific patterns across multiple data streams and time windows through Oracle Event Processing.

  • Gains real-time visibility into operation and performance of business processes, including the ability to respond to specific situations, through Oracle Business Activity Monitoring.

  • Consistently and easily secures all services through a policy-driven integrated security framework and the global policy manager in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control.

  • Executes SOA composite applications through a unified, optimized infrastructure. The SOA service infrastructure is built on top of Oracle WebLogic Server, JRockit, and Oracle Coherence.

  • Manages and monitors the previously-mentioned components through a single console natively integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control.

1.3 Key Components

Oracle SOA Suite includes the following key components.

  • Oracle Service Bus

    Oracle Service Bus is a configuration-based, policy-driven enterprise service bus designed for SOA life cycle management. Oracle Service Bus provides the following capabilities:

    • Service discovery and intermediation

    • Rapid service provisioning and deployment

    • Highly-scalable and reliable service-oriented integration, service management, and traditional message brokering across heterogeneous IT environments

    • Intelligent message brokering with routing and transformation of messages, along with service monitoring and administration in a unified software product

    For more information, see Developing Services with Oracle Service Bus and Administering Oracle Service Bus.

  • Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Process Manager

    Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides a comprehensive, standards-based, and easy-to-use solution for assembling a set of discrete services into an end-to-end process flow to reduce the cost and complexity of process integration. The BPEL process service engine is a mature, scalable, and robust BPEL server. It executes standard BPEL processes and provides dehydration capability. This enables the state of long-running business flow instances to be automatically maintained in a database, enabling clustering for both failover and scalability. Built-in human workflow services such as task, notification, and worklist management are provided to enable the integration of people and manual tasks into BPEL business flow instances. Oracle BPEL Process Manager can integrate applications and legacy systems, composing coarse-grained services from finer-grained services, building process-centric composite applications, and automating business processes and workflow applications, including routing and escalation.

    For more information, see Developing SOA Applications with Oracle SOA Suite and Administering Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

  • Oracle Event Processing

    Oracle Event Processing is a complete solution for building applications to filter, correlate, and process events in real-time. With flexible deployment options (stand-alone, integrated in the SOA stack, or lightweight on embedded Java), it provides a high performance event processing engine. Oracle Event Processing enables fast data, delivering actionable insight and maximizing value on large volumes of high velocity data from varied data sources in real-time. It enables host-to-host responsiveness by pushing fast data to the network edge.

    Built on industry standards such as ANSI SQL, Java, Spring Dynamic Modules (DM), and the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGI), Oracle Event Processing provides an open architecture for sourcing, processing, and publishing complex events throughout the enterprise. With both a visual development environment and standard Java-based tooling, Oracle Event Processing ensures that your IT team can develop event-driven applications without requiring specialized training or unique skill set investments.

    For more information, see Developing Applications for Oracle Event Processing and Administering Oracle Event Processing.

  • Oracle Business Activity Monitoring

    Oracle Business Activity Monitoring monitors business processes in real time to enable you to make informed tactical and strategic business decisions. Unlike traditional reporting systems, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring offers right-time operational intelligence for mission critical business processes. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring analyzes data before, during, and after business events.

    For more information, see Monitoring Business Activity with Oracle BAM.

  • Oracle Business Rules

    Oracle Business Rules enable dynamic business decisions at runtime, enabling you to automate policies, computations, and reasoning while separating rule logic from underlying application code. This provides for agile rule maintenance and enables business analysts to modify rule logic without programmer assistance and without interrupting business processes.

    For more information, see the Designing Business Rules with Oracle Business Process Management.

  • Oracle Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) adapters

    Oracle JCA adapters enable connectivity to virtually any data source inside the enterprise. Oracle JCA adapters are standards-based and support both web services and JCA technologies. Oracle JCA Adapters are available for the following:

    • Packaged applications

    • Legacy and mainframe applications, including Tuxedo, Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM), and Customer Information Control System (CICS)

    • Cloud applications

    • Technologies and protocols, including FTP, files, databases, AQ, JMS, MQSeries, Coherence, LDAP, User Messaging Service, and Oracle E-Business Suite

    For more information, see Understanding Technology Adapters.

  • Oracle B2B

    Oracle B2B enables an enterprise to exchange information electronically with a trading partners. Oracle B2B supports a set of industry standards, including Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), UCCnet, RosettaNet, Chemical Industry Data Exchange (CIDX), Petroleum Industry Data Exchange (PIDX), Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions (VICS), ebXML, and Universal Business Language (UBL).

    For more information, see the User's Guide for Oracle B2B.

  • Oracle SOA for Healthcare

    Oracle SOA Suite for Healthcare enables you to design, create, and manage applications that process health care data. Oracle SOA Suite for Healthcare integration provides a web-based user interface in which to create and configure health care integration applications, and monitor and manage the messages processed through those applications. You can also use the Oracle Document Editor to create and configure document definitions that define message structures.

    For more information, see the Healthcare Integration User's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite.

Oracle SOA Suite can be integrated with the following additional components:

  • Oracle Enterprise Scheduler

    Enterprise applications require the ability to off-load large transactions to run at a future time or automate the running of application maintenance work based on a defined schedule. Oracle Enterprise Scheduler enables you to run different job types, including Java, PL/SQL, binary scripts, web services, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) distributed across the nodes in an Oracle WebLogic Server cluster. Oracle Enterprise Scheduler runs jobs securely, with high availability, scalability, and load balancing. Oracle Enterprise Scheduler runs are monitored and managed through Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control.

    For more information, see Developing Applications for Oracle Enterprise Scheduler and Administering Oracle Enterprise Scheduler.

  • Oracle Managed File Transfer

    Oracle Managed File Transfer is a high performance, standards-based, end-to-end managed file gateway. It features design, deployment, and monitoring of file transfers using a lightweight, web-based, design-time console that includes file encryption, scheduling, and embedded FTP and sFTP servers.

    For more information, see Using Oracle Managed File Transfer.

1.4 Key Management Tools and Processes

Oracle SOA Suite provides a number of development, monitoring, and management tools.

1.4.1 Oracle JDeveloper

Oracle JDeveloper is the integrated development environment used by Oracle SOA Suite for building service-oriented applications with the latest industry standards for Java, XML, web services, SQL, REST, and SCA. Oracle JDeveloper supports the complete development life cycle with integrated features for modeling, coding, debugging, testing, profiling, tuning, and deploying applications. Oracle JDeveloper features a SOA Composite Editor for quickly and graphically assembling the various components and technologies used in a SOA project. User friendly wizards are provided to simplify many common tasks such as connecting to IT systems.

1.4.2 Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control

Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control is a web-based tool for managing and monitoring SOA composite applications at runtime. Administrators perform tasks such as tracking business flow instances, attaching security policies, identifying a specific message by searching on specific data, identifying and repairing errors in the Error Hospital, and so on. Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control also provides visibility into the execution of processes, showing a complete end-to-end graphical representation of the business flow followed by a given message across all the components traversed.

1.4.3 Additional Design and Runtime Tools

Oracle SOA Suite provides additional design and runtime tools for some components, as described in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1 Additional Design and Runtime Tools

Runtime Tools Description

Oracle BAM Composer

Provides a user interface for creating dashboards, alerts, business views, key performance indicators (KPIs), alerts, and parameters.

Oracle B2B Console

Provides a user interface for creating B2B transactions, including trading partners and trading partner agreements.

Oracle Managed File Transfer Console

Provides a lightweight, web-based, design-time console for defining the following artifacts:

  • The origin of files to transfer (known as sources)

  • The destination of files (known as targets)

  • A transfer that associates a source with targets

Oracle Service Bus Console

Provides configuration tools for creating service level agreement alerts, pipeline alerts, messaging reporting actions, alert destinations, and throttling groups for business service endpoints. You can also update environmental values, either individually or in bulk.

Oracle SOA Composer

Provides a runtime environment for creating domain value maps, approval management extensions, business rules, and composite sensors in deployed composites.

Oracle Healthcare for Healthcare Integration Console

Provides support for messaging protocols and creating and managing endpoints, managing documents, creating map sets, and creating Java callouts.

1.5 Overview of an Oracle SOA Suite Process Flow

The remaining chapters of this guide provide an overview of how Oracle SOA Suite components work together in a process flow from design time through runtime to address the business challenges faced by a company.

For more information, see Business Challenges of Company X .