The Oracle SOA Suite 12c infrastructure stack

As mentioned earlier, Oracle SOA Suite 12c is a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products. Oracle has put in the efforts to make this stack robust, extensible, and agile, in part by including some of the best technologies available in the market. Instead of cobbling together enterprise solutions from disparate vendors and products, Oracle SOA Suite 12c 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. These components include:

• JDeveloper: This provides a design and development environment for software developers and architects, using Oracle SOA Suite 12c to create standards-based reusable enterprise software assets.
• Service components: These can be built as BPEL/BPMN processes, business rules and decision components, human tasks, events and mediators, or a combination thereof. They are the building blocks that are used to construct SOA composite applications. The service infrastructure, comprised of a unified platform for services, processes, and events, provides internal message transport infrastructure capabilities to connect service components and enable data flow. Service engines such as BPEL, Mediator, Human Workflow, Decision Service, and BPMN service engines, process messages received from the service infrastructure.
• OSB: This provides a framework for lightweight, scalable, and reliable service orchestration that is designed to connect, mediate, and manage the 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. Starting with the Oracle SOA Suite 12c release, OSB is built into the suite.
• Oracle BAM: This is used to build interactive real-time dashboards and proactive alerts in order to monitor business processes and services, giving business executives and operation managers the information they need to make better business decisions and take corrective actions if the business environment changes.
• Oracle B2B: This enables integration between trading partners 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 Web Services Manager (OWSM): This is used to govern interactions with shared services through security and operational policy management and enforcement to ensure that the service reuse remains under control. Every Oracle SOA Suite 12c domain has this component built in by default to facilitate the management of web services.
• Oracle Enterprise Scheduler: This provides a scheduling capability to enterprise applications deployed on Oracle SOA Suite 12c. It supports many types of jobs including those based on Java, PL/SQL, and web services that can be used to offload larger transactions to run these jobs based on a schedule or automate the execution of maintenance work.

Other binding components and services that would require the knowledge and attention of the administrator include:

• Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) adapters
• HTTP bindings
• REST services
• Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) services
• Direct binding services
• Application Development Framework (ADF) Business Component services
• Business events
• The User Messaging Server (UMS)

SOA composite applications can consist of a variety of components, binding components, references, and services, all of which can be administered from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. A screenshot of Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control 12c is shown here:

Figure 1.6: A screenshot of Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control 12c

(This will be discussed in much detail in Chapter 2, Navigating Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control 12c.)

What differentiates Oracle SOA Suite 12c from other comparable products on the market is the consolidation of the stack into a unified service platform that translates to major user benefits. A Service Component Architecture (SCA), a maturing Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), is the key enabler here. SCA enables you to manage versions and deploy components and metadata as a single unit. All artifacts are stored in a single repository, the Oracle Metadata Services (MDS). But, the story doesn't stop here; Oracle SOA Suite 12c also consolidates the runtime into a modular architecture of engines plugging into a common service infrastructure. And the engine consolidation naturally leads to a simplified monitoring infrastructure, still maintaining a vendor-neutral Java EE platform! All of this translates into numerous design time, runtime, and monitoring benefits, many of which we will explore throughout this book.