Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite 11g with Oracle Service Bus

Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite 11g with Oracle Service Bus

Oracle SOA Suite 11g is a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products. It provides a comprehensive integration suite of products that are focused on providing a robust, agile and reliable SOA (service oriented architecture) solution.

The main and key products of Oracle SOA Suite 11g are:

§  Oracle BPEL Process Manager

§  Oracle Business Rules

§  Oracle Service Bus

§  Oracle Business Activity Monitoring

§  Oracle Event Processing

§  Oracle Adapters

Oracle SOA Suite components can be categorized into two main architectural categories.

Business Service Layer	§  Oracle SOA Composite Platform §  BPEL Process Manager (BPEL PM) §  Human Workflow (HWF) §  Business Rules §  Mediator §  Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
SOA Infrastructure	§  Oracle Service Bus (OSB) §  Oracle Event Processing (OEP) §  Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) §  Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM) §  Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER)

Let’s have a closer look at the role of the Enterprise Service Bus in SOA Suite.

The Service Bus

An Enterprise Service Bus, also called ESB, is the backbone of the suite. It integrates with all other components in the architecture. It is lightweight, scalable and reliable. The main goal is to connect, mediate and manage interactions between heterogeneous services, legacy systems, main components like ERP and CRM, and also other ESB systems.

The Oracle Service Bus (OSB) can transform message formats, integration and security protocols to provide loose coupling between systems.

Key Benefits

§  Loose Coupling of Services

§  Transport Protocol

§  Message Transformation

§  Security

§  Service Enablement

§  Location Transparency

§  Policy attachment and enforcement

§  Service granularity management through service aggregation

§  Change Management

§  Add new consumers to an existing service

§  Change service implementation

§  Change policies associated with a service

§  Add new versions of the service

§  Add additional providers of a service

§  24 x 7 up-time

§  Resource Optimization

§  Ease of Management

Main Capabilities

§  Routing (Static and Dynamic)

§  Message transformation

§  Protocol switching

§  Monitoring and alert mechanism

§  Service lifecycle management

§  Security policy enforcement

§  Service result caching

§  Auditing

§  Service aggregation

§  Traffic Shaping

§  End point management

Summary

Oracle SOA Suite 11g provides a great set of products that helps in solving the problems faced by IT organizations. Choosing the right technology platform is as important as choosing the service oriented approach. An ESB is a critical component to create a scalable SOA backbone foundation.