3 Overview of Oracle Fusion Middleware Components

Oracle Fusion Middleware provides many components, such as Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle HTTP Server, and Oracle Coherence.

• About the Oracle Fusion Middleware Infrastructure
  Oracle Fusion Middleware Infrastructure is an Oracle Fusion Middleware distribution that provides Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Coherence, and the Oracle JRF infrastructure services.
• About Oracle WebLogic Server
  The Oracle WebLogic Server is a scalable, enterprise-ready Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server. The Oracle WebLogic Server infrastructure supports the deployment of many types of distributed applications and is an ideal foundation for building applications based on SOA.
• About Oracle Web Services
  A Web Service is a set of functions packaged into a single application that is available to other systems on a network. The network can be a corporate intranet or the Internet. Because Web Services rely on basic, standard technologies which most systems provide, they are an excellent means for connecting distributed systems together.
• About Oracle Coherence
  Oracle Coherence provides clustered data management with a fully coherent, single system image (SSI), scalability for both read and write access, fast, transparent failover and failback, linear scalability for storage and processing, no Single-Points-of-Failure (SPOFs) and cluster-wide locking and transactions
• About Oracle HTTP Server
  Oracle HTTP Server is based on Apache HTTP Server infrastructure, and includes modules developed specifically by Oracle. The features of single sign-on, clustered deployment, and high availability enhance the operation of the Oracle HTTP Server.
• About Oracle User Messaging Service
  Oracle User Messaging Service enables two-way communication between users and deployed applications.
• About Oracle Platform Security Services
  Oracle Platform Security Services provides enterprise product development teams, systems integrators, and independent software vendors with a standards-based, portable, integrated, enterprise-grade security framework for Java SE and Java EE applications.
• About Oracle Identity Management
  
• About Oracle Data Integrator
  Oracle Data Integrator provides a fully unified solution for building, deploying, and managing complex data warehouses or as part of data-centric architectures in a SOA or business intelligence environment.
• About Oracle SOA Suite
  Service Oriented Architecture (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.
• About Oracle Business Process Management Suite
  Oracle BPM Suite provides an integrated environment for developing, administering, and using business applications centered around business processes.
• About Oracle Managed File Transfer
  Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) is a high performance, standards-based, end-to-end managed file gateway.
• About Oracle Enterprise Data Quality
  Oracle Enterprise Data Quality provides a comprehensive data quality management environment that is used to understand, improve, protect and govern data quality.
• About Oracle Enterprise Scheduler
  With Oracle Enterprise Scheduler, you can define, schedule and run jobs. A job is a unit of work done on an application's behalf.
• About Oracle Stream Analytics
  Oracle Stream Analytics consists of the Oracle Stream Analytics server, Oracle Stream Analytics Visualizer, a command-line administrative interface, and the Oracle JDeveloper Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
• About Oracle Traffic Director
  Oracle Traffic Director is a fast, reliable, and scalable layer-7 software load balancer. You can set up Oracle Traffic Director to serve as the reliable entry point for all HTTP, HTTPS and TCP traffic to application servers and web servers in the back end.
• About Oracle WebCenter Content
  Oracle WebCenter Content can help a corporation unify, manage, and leverage all types of content across the entire enterprise. All corporate lines of business such as marketing, brand management, web presence, accounting, sales, human resources, and engineering can share the same tools and easily access the same information in a common repository.
• About Oracle WebCenter Portal
  Oracle WebCenter Portal is an integrated set of components with which you can create social applications, enterprise portals, collaborative communities, and composite applications, built on a standards-based, service-oriented architecture.
• About Oracle WebCenter Sites
  Oracle WebCenter Sites is a Web Experience Management system. It helps you build desktop and mobile websites, personalize them with targeted content, gather feedback on their success, analyze visitor interactions with the website, and test changes to your website based on your visitors' preferences.
• About Oracle BI Enterprise Edition
  Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (sometimes simply referred to as Oracle Business Intelligence) provides a full range of business intelligence capabilities.
• About Oracle Forms Services
  Oracle Forms is used to develop and deploy Forms applications. The Forms applications provide a user interface to access Oracle Database in an efficient and tightly-coupled way.

About the Oracle Fusion Middleware Infrastructure

Oracle Fusion Middleware Infrastructure is an Oracle Fusion Middleware distribution that provides Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Coherence, and the Oracle JRF infrastructure services.

The Oracle JRF infrastructure services include:

• Oracle Application Development Framework

• Oracle Metadata Services

• Oracle Platform Security Services

• Oracle Web Services Manager

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control

These services are installed into the Oracle common directory inside the Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c Oracle home by the Infrastructure installer.

Note that the equivalent installer in Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is the Application Developer 11g installer, which requires an existing installation of Oracle WebLogic Server. In 12c, the Oracle Fusion Middleware Infrastructure distribution consists of both Oracle WebLogic Server and the Oracle JRF in a single installer.

About Oracle WebLogic Server

The Oracle WebLogic Server is a scalable, enterprise-ready Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server. The Oracle WebLogic Server infrastructure supports the deployment of many types of distributed applications and is an ideal foundation for building applications based on SOA.

Java EE is a widely used platform for server programming in the Java programming language. The Java EE Platform differs from the standard edition of Java in that it adds libraries which provide functionality to deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-tier Java software, based largely on modular components running on an application server.

In addition to the Java EE implementation, Oracle WebLogic Server enables enterprises to deploy business-critical applications in a robust, secure, highly available, manageable, and scalable environment. These features allow enterprises to configure clusters of Oracle WebLogic Server instances to distribute load and provide extra capacity in case of hardware or other failures. New diagnostic tools allow system administrators to monitor and tune the performance of deployed applications and the Oracle WebLogic Server environment itself. You can also configure Oracle WebLogic Server to monitor and tune application throughput automatically, without human intervention. Extensive security features protect access to services, keep enterprise data secure, and prevent malicious attacks.

See Introduction in Understanding Oracle WebLogic Server.

About Oracle Web Services

A Web Service is a set of functions packaged into a single application that is available to other systems on a network. The network can be a corporate intranet or the Internet. Because Web Services rely on basic, standard technologies which most systems provide, they are an excellent means for connecting distributed systems together. They can be shared by and used as a component of distributed Web-based applications. Other systems, such as customer relationship management systems, order-processing systems, and other existing back-end applications, can call a Web Service function to request data or perform an operation.

For an overview of Web services in Oracle Fusion Middleware, a description of the Web services and clients supported in each category, and a roadmap for implementing Oracle Fusion Middleware Web services, see What are Web Services? in Understanding Web Services.

About Oracle Coherence

Oracle Coherence provides clustered data management with a fully coherent, single system image (SSI), scalability for both read and write access, fast, transparent failover and failback, linear scalability for storage and processing, no Single-Points-of-Failure (SPOFs) and cluster-wide locking and transactions

Built on top of this foundation are the various services that Coherence provides, including database caching, HTTP session management, grid agent invocation and distributed queries.

For information about Oracle Coherence, see Introduction to Coherence in Developing Applications with Oracle Coherence.

About Oracle HTTP Server

Oracle HTTP Server is based on Apache HTTP Server infrastructure, and includes modules developed specifically by Oracle. The features of single sign-on, clustered deployment, and high availability enhance the operation of the Oracle HTTP Server.

Oracle HTTP Server has the following components to handle client requests:

• HTTP listener, to handle incoming requests and route them to the appropriate processing utility.

• Modules (mods), to implement and extend the basic functionality of Oracle HTTP Server. Many of the standard Apache HTTP Server modules are included with Oracle HTTP Server. Oracle also includes several modules that are specific to Oracle Fusion Middleware to support integration between Oracle HTTP Server and other Oracle Fusion Middleware components.

• Perl interpreter, a persistent Perl runtime environment embedded in Oracle HTTP Server through mod_perl.

For information about Oracle HTTP Server, see Administering Oracle HTTP Server.

About Oracle User Messaging Service

Oracle User Messaging Service enables two-way communication between users and deployed applications.

Key features include:

• Support for a variety of messaging channels: Messages can be sent and received through email, instant messaging (IM) (XMPP), short message service (SMS) (SMPP), and voice.

• Two-way messaging: In addition to sending messages from applications to users (referred to as outbound messaging), users can initiate messaging interactions (inbound messaging). For example, a user can send an email or text message to a specified address; the message is routed to the appropriate application that can then respond to the user or invoke another process according to its business logic.

• User messaging preferences: End users can use a web interface to define preferences for how and when they receive messaging notifications. Applications immediately become more flexible; rather than deciding whether to send to a user's email address or IM client, the application can simply send the message to the user, and let UMS route the message according to the user's preferences.

• Robust message delivery: UMS keeps track of delivery status information provided by messaging gateways, and makes this information available to applications so that they can respond to a failed delivery. Or, applications can specify one or more failover addresses for a message in case delivery to the initial address fails. Using the failover capability of UMS frees application developers from having to implement complicated retry logic.

For information about Oracle User Messaging Service, see Introduction to Oracle User Messaging Service in Administering Oracle User Messaging Service.

About Oracle Platform Security Services

Oracle Platform Security Services provides enterprise product development teams, systems integrators, and independent software vendors with a standards-based, portable, integrated, enterprise-grade security framework for Java SE and Java EE applications.

Oracle Platform Security Services is the underlying security platform that provides security to Oracle Fusion Middleware including WebLogic Server, Server Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, Oracle WebCenter, and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) applications.

Oracle Platform Security Services provides an abstraction layer in the form of application programming interfaces (APIs) that insulate developers from security and identity management implementation details. With OPSS, developers do not need to know the details of, for example, cryptographic key management, repository interfaces, or other identity management infrastructures. Using OPSS, in-house developed applications, third-party applications, and integrated applications benefit from the same, uniform security, identity management, and audit services across the enterprise.

See What Is Oracle Platform Security Services? in Securing Applications with Oracle Platform Security Services.

About Oracle Identity Management

Oracle Identity Management enables organizations to effectively manage the end-to-end lifecycle of user identities across all enterprise resources, both within and beyond the firewall and into the cloud. The Oracle Identity Management platform delivers scalable solutions for identity governance, access management and directory services. This modern platform helps organizations strengthen security, simplify compliance and capture business opportunities around mobile and social access.

For more information about integrating Oracle Identity Management components, see Introduction to IdM Suite Components Integration in Integration Guide for Oracle Identity Management Suite.

About Oracle Data Integrator

Oracle Data Integrator provides a fully unified solution for building, deploying, and managing complex data warehouses or as part of data-centric architectures in a SOA or business intelligence environment. In addition, it combines all the elements of data integration — data movement, data synchronization, data quality, data management, and data services—to ensure that information is timely, accurate, and consistent across complex systems.

Oracle Data Integrator features an active integration platform that includes all styles of data integration: data-based, event-based and service-based. ODI unifies silos of integration by transforming large volumes of data efficiently, processing events in real time through its advanced Changed Data Capture (CDC) capability, and providing data services to the Oracle SOA Suite. It also provides robust data integrity control features, assuring the consistency and correctness of data. With powerful core differentiators — heterogeneous E-LT, Declarative Design and Knowledge Modules — Oracle Data Integrator meets the performance, flexibility, productivity, modularity and hot-pluggability requirements of an integration platform.

See Overview of Oracle Data Integrator in Understanding Oracle Data Integrator.

About Oracle SOA Suite

Service Oriented Architecture (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.

Oracle SOA Suite 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.

See What Is Oracle SOA Suite? in Administering Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

About Oracle Business Process Management Suite

Oracle BPM Suite provides an integrated environment for developing, administering, and using business applications centered around business processes.

Oracle BPM Suite provides a seamless integration of all stages of the application development lifecycle from design-time and implementation to runtime and application management. Oracle BPM Suite is layered on Oracle SOA Suite and shares many of the same product components.

See What Is Oracle Business Process Management Suite? in Administering Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

About Oracle Managed File Transfer

Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) 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.

See Understanding Oracle Managed File Transfer in Using Oracle Managed File Transfer.

About Oracle Enterprise Data Quality

Oracle Enterprise Data Quality provides a comprehensive data quality management environment that is used to understand, improve, protect and govern data quality.

EDQ facilitates best practice master data management, data integration, business intelligence, and data migration initiatives. EDQ provides integrated data quality in customer relationship management and other applications.

See About Oracle Enterprise Data Quality in Understanding Enterprise Data Quality Concepts.

About Oracle Enterprise Scheduler

With Oracle Enterprise Scheduler, you can define, schedule and run jobs. A job is a unit of work done on an application's behalf.

For example, you might define a job that runs a particular PL/SQL function or command-line process. You can define a job that executes Java code.

See Introduction to Administering Oracle Enterprise Scheduler in Administering Oracle Enterprise Scheduler.

About Oracle Stream Analytics

Oracle Stream Analytics consists of the Oracle Stream Analytics server, Oracle Stream Analytics Visualizer, a command-line administrative interface, and the Oracle JDeveloper Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

An Oracle Stream Analytics server hosts logically related resources and services for running Oracle Stream Analytics applications. Servers are grouped into and managed as domains. A domain can have one server (standalone-server domain) or many (multiserver domain). You manage the Oracle Stream Analytics domains and servers through Oracle Stream Analytics Visualizer and the Oracle Stream Analytics administrative command-line interface.

See Event Processing Overview in Oracle Stream Analytics in Getting Started with Event Processing for Oracle Stream Analytics.

About Oracle Traffic Director

Oracle Traffic Director is a fast, reliable, and scalable layer-7 software load balancer. You can set up Oracle Traffic Director to serve as the reliable entry point for all HTTP, HTTPS and TCP traffic to application servers and web servers in the back end.

Oracle Traffic Director distributes the requests that it receives from clients to servers in the back end based on the specified load-balancing method, routes the requests based on specified rules, caches frequently accessed data, prioritizes traffic, and controls the quality of service.

The architecture of Oracle Traffic Director enables it to handle large volumes of application traffic with low latency. The product is optimized for use in Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle SuperCluster. It can communicate with servers in the back end over Exalogic's InfiniBand fabric.

See Getting Started with Oracle Traffic Director in Administering Oracle Traffic Director.

About Oracle WebCenter Content

Oracle WebCenter Content can help a corporation unify, manage, and leverage all types of content across the entire enterprise. All corporate lines of business such as marketing, brand management, web presence, accounting, sales, human resources, and engineering can share the same tools and easily access the same information in a common repository.

By centralizing information and allowing access to information by qualified users, Oracle WebCenter Content provides cost savings, eliminates redundancy and increases efficiency. At the same time, information is properly managed, tracked, and disposed of as needed.

See Understanding Oracle WebCenter Content Concepts.

About Oracle WebCenter Portal

Oracle WebCenter Portal is an integrated set of components with which you can create social applications, enterprise portals, collaborative communities, and composite applications, built on a standards-based, service-oriented architecture. Oracle WebCenter Portal combines dynamic user interface technologies with which to develop rich internet applications, the flexibility and power of an integrated, multi-channel portal framework, and a set of tools and services that provide content, collaboration, presence and social networking capabilities.

Based on these components, Oracle WebCenter Portal also provides an out-of-the-box enterprise-ready customizable application called WebCenter Portal, with a configurable work environment that enables individuals and groups to work and collaborate more effectively.

Oracle WebCenter Portal provides an open and extensible solution that allows users to interact directly with tools like instant messaging, documents, content management, discussion forums, wikis, blogs, and tagging directly from within the context of a portal or an application. These tools and services empower end users and IT to build and deploy next-generation collaborative applications and portals.

See Introducing Oracle WebCenter Portal in Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal.

About Oracle WebCenter Sites

Oracle WebCenter Sites is a Web Experience Management system. It helps you build desktop and mobile websites, personalize them with targeted content, gather feedback on their success, analyze visitor interactions with the website, and test changes to your website based on your visitors' preferences.

The Oracle WebCenter Sites: Contributor interface offers a set of features for building and managing the components of your website. In addition, features such as Oracle WebCenter Sites: A/B Testing are available to help users measure their website's success so they can enhance it accordingly.

To cater to administrators, Oracle WebCenter Sites provides the Admin interface and the WEM Admin interface which, together, provide the tools needed to manage all aspects of a content management site. In addition, you can enable features such as Oracle WebCenter Sites: Insights, Oracle WebCenter Sites: A/B Testing, and Conversions which help your content contributors and marketers measure website successfulness so they can enhance it accordingly.

See Introduction to Oracle WebCenter Sites in Using Oracle WebCenter Sites.

About Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (sometimes simply referred to as Oracle Business Intelligence) provides a full range of business intelligence capabilities.

These capabilities enable you to:

• Collect up-to-date data from your organization.

• Present the data in easy-to-understand formats (such as tables and graphs).

• Deliver data in a timely fashion to the employees in your organization.

These capabilities enable your organization to make better decisions, take informed actions, and implement more-efficient business processes.

See Introduction to Oracle BI Enterprise Edition in System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

About Oracle Forms Services

Oracle Forms is used to develop and deploy Forms applications. The Forms applications provide a user interface to access Oracle Database in an efficient and tightly-coupled way.

The applications can be integrated with Java and web services to take advantage of service-oriented architecture (SOA).

See Oracle Forms in Forms Services Deployment Guide.