On July 1, 2009 Oracle announced the 11gR1 release of Fusion Middleware of which SOA Suite is a key part. Service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process management (BPM), event-driven architecture (EDA), and related technologies are at the heart of modern enterprise software solutions aimed at providing greater business agility and adaptability. So far SOA and BPM enabling tools have focused mainly on modularizing applications and IT functionalities using services encapsulation, leaving a major gap when it comes to composing real-life business applications from them and managing their entire life cycle. SOA Suite 11g fills this gap in the context of services, processes, and events, as does the entire Fusion Middleware platform in a broader middleware context.
With Fusion Middleware 11g release, Oracle continues to extend the guiding principles behind its Fusion products: complete, integrated, open, and best-of-breed. Specifically, for SOA Suite 11g this amounts to a unified platform with all the tools that are necessary to work with services, processes, and events, from conception through development and deployment to operational and change management so as to provide very high developer productivity and operational ease. This also means that all SOA Suite components continue to be based on industry standards, remain hot-pluggable to provide best-in-the-industry interoperability in heterogeneous technology environments, and while the SOA Suite components are well integrated, each of them continues to lead the market in its features and performance. Keeping the goal of enablement of business excellence in mind, SOA Suite 11g has been designed to help produce business applications quickly and run them efficiently, adapt these applications easily when business changes demand, manage and monitor these applications, and drastically reduce the gaps in business-IT interactions.
BPM, SOA, and integration solutions involve connection to applications, services, system-level automation, human workflows, document-processing workflows, business rules, and B2B. They also involve security policies, exception handling, and mediation of service requests. These applications are often deployed as distributed applications. To get the maximum productivity and value from these integration solution projects, in addition to a good product, you need a good understanding of the applicable software tools. To help you in understanding the tools better, the SOA Suite product management team has put together this getting-started tutorial.
The authors have had first-hand experience in creating, delivering, and rolling-out SOA Suite 11gR1 training programs internally and externally to partners and customers. This book takes a divide-and-conquer approach and builds up a non-trivial service-oriented composite application in a step-by-step fashion so that it is easy for the reader to follow and appreciate the workings of the SOA Suite product. If your goal is to exploit SOA and related paradigms to deliver business value quickly, this book will put you on the right track. SOA Suite 11g is a result of a lot of careful design and hard work by one of the best software product teams in the industry. It is a best-in-class product and I hope that you will enjoy working with it.
Amlan Debnath
Senior Vice President,
Product Development
Oracle Corporation