Introduction to Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture Suite

Introduction to Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture Suite

What Exactly is SOA ..?

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. 

Name Itself indicates that SOA is Composite of Services or Bundle of Service used to automated a business process.

What is Services ..?

SOA separates business functions into distinct units, or services. A SOA application reuses services to automate a business process.

Any standard interface and message structure define services. The most widely used mechanism are web services standards. These standards include the "Web Service Description Language" (WSDL) file for service interface definition and "XML Schema Documents" (XSD) for message structure definition. 

These XML standards are easily exchanged using standard protocols. Because standards for web services use a standard document structure, they enable existing systems to interoperate regardless of the choice of operating system and computer language used for service implementation.

Oracle SOA Suite

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. 

Below are the components Available under SOA Suite

• Messaging
• Service discovery
• Orchestration
• Web services management and security
• Business rules
• Human interaction
• Events framework
• Business activity monitoring

Standards Used in SOA

SOA users Service component Architecture Assembly (SCA) Model. And Oracle SOA Suite puts a very strong value on Standards and interoperability

Below are the specifications of SCA at high Level

SDO (Service Data Objects) :

Service Data Objects is a technology that allows heterogeneous data to be accessed in a uniform way. Knowledge is not required about how to access a particular back-end data source to use SDO in a SOA composite application.

Data sources can be relational databases, XML, Web services and enterprise information systems. It allows programmers to access and manipulate data from these data sources in a unified manner.
SDO has many important and useful features, few are:

• It Reducing the number of data APIs, thereby simplifies the J2EE data programming model
• Streamlining the processing of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Decoupling of application code from data access code 
• Providing support for XML and also integrating XML.
• Providing metadata API
• It is XML Friendly.

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) :

With BPEL, we design a business process that integrates a series of individually separate and distinct.
services into an end-to-end process flow. This integration reduces process cost and complexity. Both 1.1 and 2.0 BPEL Versions are supported.

Provides enterprises with an industry standard for business-process orchestration and execution.

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) :

Processes XML documents and transforms document data from one XML schema to another.XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG.XSLT 1.0 is widely supported in modern web browsers.

XQuery (XQuery Transformations) :

Queries and transforms collections of structured and unstructured data, typically in the form of XML.

JCA (Java Connector Architecture) :

Provides a Java technology solution to the problem of connectivity between the many application servers in Enterprise Information Systems (EIS).

Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) is a Java-based technology solution for connecting application servers and enterprise information systems (EIS) as part of enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions. While JDBC is specifically used to connect Java EE applications to databases, JCA is a more generic architecture for connection to legacy systems. JCA was developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 16 (JCA 1.0), JSR 112 (JCA 1.5) and JSR 322 (JCA 1.6).

JMS (Java Messaging Service) :

Provides a messaging standard that allows application components based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) to access business logic distributed among heterogeneous systems.

The Java Message Service (JMS) is a Java message-oriented middleware API for sending messages between two or more clients.It is an implementation to handle the producer–consumer problem. JMS is a part of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE), and was defined by a specification developed at Sun Microsystems,It allows the communication between different components of a distributed application to be loosely coupled, reliable, and asynchronous

WSDL(Web Service Definition Language) :

Provides the entry points into a SOA composite application. The WSDL file provides a standard contract language and is central for understanding the capabilities of a service.

SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol) :

Provides the default network protocol for message delivery.

REST(Representational State Transfer):

Provides an architecture for designing network applications. RESTful applications use HTTP requests to post data (create and update), get data (for example, make queries), and delete data. REST provides an alternative to using web services.

JSON(JavaScript Object Notation) :

Provides a language for representing simple data structures and associative arrays called objects. JSON is a standard designed for human-readable data interchange. JSON is derived from the JavaScript scripting language.

WADL(Web Application Description Language) :

Provides a readable XML description of HTTP-based web applications (typically REST web services). WADL simplifies the reuse of web services based on the existing HTTP architecture of the web.