SOA Suite Capabilities

In this post I'm gonna talk about SOA components.Also, Very briefly about SOA components which gets configured when SOA suite is being installed.

Before we begin discussion on SOA Components, Let's understand ground level concept in SOA.

SOA Is an architectural style which helps in building connected enterprise applications to provide solutions to business problems.By following SOA - Enterprise applications modules can be exposed as web services which helps in easy integration and helps in reuse.There are lot more definitions comes up from google! Give a try.

From  architectural style - Loose coupling, interoperability.From customer's perspective it's about more or less of integration of different legacy systems which helps IT to deliver, in greater flexibility and speed with Changing Markets,increasing competitive pressures, and evolving customer needs.

Here in SOA - Services play very important role and key factors in listing SOA Components ;).
  • Oracle Service Bus
  • Oracle BPEL Process Manager
  • Oracle Jdeveloper
  • Oracle Enterprise Manager
  • Some more...(Will be covered in next post)



SOA services have self-describing interfaces in platform-independent XML documents. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is the standard used to describe the services.Services communicate with messages formally defined via XML Schema (also called XSD). Means, Playaround with data.

Communication among consumers and providers or services typically happens in heterogeneous environments, with little or no knowledge about the provider. Services exchange information through messages.Messages require Transformation when communication happens from one XML to another due to use of different messages in different services. i.e Produces output document as an XML document.
Since messages can be received through any protocol such as HTTP(s), JMS, File , and has to be send messages through same or different protocol proper Routing for messages is required.

That's the reason - Oracle Service Bus - Does message transformation, routing..etc.


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Prior to Service Bus, you require an automated system which develops SOA Services/Composites.
Integrated development Environments should provide a capability of building service oriented appliactions using latest industry standards like Java, XML,  Web Services.It should support complete end to end development life cycle including coding, debugging, testing and deploying applications.

Here Comes - Oracle Jdeveloper -  It's Integrated Development Environment that simplifies the development of Java-based SOA applications and user interfaces with support for the full development life cycle. 

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There is still more of it. Orchestrations of services are required as and when there is a requirement to combine existing services into new services.Solution should be provided where assembling a set of discrete services into an end-to-end process can be done.Radically, which helps in reducing the cost and complexity of process integration initiatives.

There's a solution - 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, radically reducing the cost and complexity of process integration.

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There's still lot more into SOA.How about management and monitoring of SOA?
Once SOA composite is being developed there should be a way to configure, monitor and manage during runtime.There should be a tool or application or solution which helps administrators in providing unparalleled visibility into execution of processes showing complete end to end representation in graphical diagram.

How about Web browser-based, graphical user interface ? - Oracle Enterprise Manager - Management and monitoring of Oracle SOA Suite is done through Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control.


There are some more components which makes Successful SOA! like Service Security, Service Repository, Service Policies which will be covered in next post.Stay tuned.



What is soa-infra?

Well,This post is to explain very shortly about soa-infra.

Heard of it? It's an J2EE Compliant application and can be deployed over Weblogic Server.It's responsible for managing composites that you deploy and it manages composites life cycle.


Generally, during development phase, you deploy soa composite application designed in Oracle JDeveloper to soa-infra.using soa-infra application we should be able to monitor soa composite apps or individual composite instances.



Using Enterprise Manager(EM) one can configure soa-infra to it and monitor the states of composites that's being deployed.

Cloud Computing

There is lot of buzz going on with cloud computing.
In very basic terms cloud computing indicates - cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to shared pool of configurable resources such as networks,servers,storage or any kind of applications which can be provisioned to customers rapidly on need basis.


Cloud computing can be deliverd into different model depending on requirement.
It defines basically three models where industries are looking over.


1) Software as a Service(SaaS)
2) Platform as a Service(PaaS)
3) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)


Here,to explain briefly
SaaS is basically about sharing an application to customers.But,Customer or end user will not be having access to operating system being used or any kind of hardware or network infrastructure on which it's running. Customer just uses the application.
Here, SaaS provider installs, manages and maintains the software. The provider does not necessarily own the physical infrastructure in which the software is running. Regardless, the consumer does not have access to the infrastructure; they can access only the application.








PaaS is basically about sharing a hosted environment to run their applications.But,Here customer can have control over application being used.
Here, PaaS  provider manages the cloud infrastructure for the platform, typically a framework for a particular type of application. The consumer’s application cannot access the infrastructure underneath the platform.






IaaS is basically about sharing or providing infrastructure related resources such as storage,networking components or may be middleware too.Major difference here is customer can have control over Operating system, storage, deployed applications, network resources being used.
Here, IaaS  provider maintains the storage, database, message queue or other middleware, or the hosting environment for virtual machines. The consumer uses that service as if it were a disk drive, database, message queue, or machine, but they cannot access the infrastructure that hosts it.




With all this,The most important concern is about security of cloud services. I am gonna discuss in great details on this with certain customer use cases.But,Finally to achieve cloud computing "Service Management" really plays a very important role.In addition to that, SLA's, Lifecycle management,Governance plays the key.


I am really not impressed with cloud computing as it's just term used as how IT trend is going on. you must have heard about IaaS long term ago ? 

Oracle Certified SOA Architect.

Welcome Techies.


I am happy to share that i am now certified as Oracle SOA Architect Expert. :-)


From hereon,I would be sharing many more intretesting and hot topics in IT world happenings..