Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1

A Hands-On Tutorial

As the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture has matured, it has triggered the
emergence of new, sophisticated, and specialized tools: Enterprise Service Buses (ESB)
for service virtualization, BPEL for orchestration, Human Workflow, Business Rules for
externalizing key pieces of logic, and so on. As a result, developers now have a rich set of
tools to work with. However, this can itself present a challenge: how can one keep up
with all these various tools and their capabilities? One of the key goals of Oracle SOA
Suite 11g is to assemble these tools in a cohesive, simple-to-use, and highly-integrated
development environment. This book, organized around a tutorial that is built in an
iterative fashion, will guide you through all the components of the suite and how they
relate to each other.

The authors are part of the Oracle SOA Suite product management team, and the idea
of the book came as we were delivering an earlier version of this material, as an
accelerated internal training at Oracle—before the product was even released. These
training sessions were very well received and we decided it was worth sharing this
material with a larger audience.

This book is not meant to be used as reference material—it is an accelerated learning
path to the Oracle SOA Suite. The focus is on breadth rather than on depth. More
specifically, we wanted to highlight the key capabilities and role of each product in the
Oracle SOA Suite and explain how they can be put to work together to deliver highly
capable and flexible applications. Too often we, as developers, tend to stretch the limits
of (not to say abuse!) a few technologies, simply to stay within our comfort zone—and
because there is always so little time to learn new things. With its streamlined format, we
hope this book will give you the confidence to further explore some of these technologies
you had never looked at before.

What This Book Covers

The principal aim of this book is to get you operational with Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1
quickly and easily. In this spirit, the largest part of this book is dedicated towards a set of
hands-on step-by-step tutorials that build a non-trivial SOA composite that you can
deploy, test, run, monitor, and manage.

Chapter 1 starts the book off with a quick refresher on some of the useful concepts
regarding SOA and services and concludes with an introduction to Service Component
Architecture (SCA).

Chapter 2 discusses the key challenges in the technical implementation of SOA-based
applications and how Oracle SOA Suite 11g leverages SCA principles to address
these challenges.

Chapter 3 describes the business and technical requirements for a purchase order
(PO) processing composite and gives you an overview of how the complete solution
will be built up in a set of discrete steps using a series of tutorials using Oracle SOA
Suite 11gR1.

Chapter 4 gives you the necessary instructions for download, installation, and
configuration of Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1.

The core functionalities of the PO processing composite that is described in Chapter 3 are
built in Chapters 5 through 10. This series of chapters will teach you the basics of
working with Oracle SOA Suite 11g and the IDE (JDeveloper).

You start building the composite using a mediator, as well as web services and database
adapters. You then add a file adapter and a BPEL (Business Process Execution
Language) component to create a process that orchestrates the overall flow, adding
human interaction, creating conditional process execution using business rules, and
accessing external services via a JMS (Java Message Service) adapter. At the end of each
and every chapter, you will have a composite that can be deployed, run, and tested. You
are advised to go through these tutorial chapters, 5-10 in a sequential manner.

The tutorials in Chapters 11 through 19 let you add more functionality to the composite
and explore some of the operational features of Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1. You will learn
service re-use and virtualization using Oracle Service Bus (OSB), explore some of the
composite life cycle management features, test the composite using the unit testing
framework, incorporate exception handling, add security policies to a service, set up a
business activity-level tracking of the composite transactions using Oracle Business
Activity Monitoring (BAM), work with events using the unified services and events
platform of Oracle SOA Suite 11g, handle data using Service Data Object (SDO)
specification, and connect the composite to a Business-to-Business (B2B) gateway using
Oracle B2B.

By the end of Chapter 19, you should have a good grasp of all components in Oracle
SOA Suite 11gR1, and be able to create modular, full-featured service composites. The
concluding remarks in Chapter 20 will briefly discuss some of the ways you could use
such composites to provide business benefits.

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Category: Oracle