What are the benefits of upgrading from Oracle SOA Suite 11g to 12c? There are numerous, but from an administration standpoint, some of the desirable features introduced with 12c include:
Built-in support for mobile integration. There are improved wizards and adapters that allow easier REST integration; developers can easily expose any reference or service as REST, and support for automated conversion from XML to JSON is now included.
Cloud integration through newly published cloud adapters, wherein all nuances of interacting with third-party cloud services are handled by these adapters.
New technology adapters such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) adapter and Coherence adapter.
The Execution Context ID (ECID) (discussed in detail in Chapter 6, Monitoring Oracle SOA Suite 12c) now spans both OSB services and SOA composites, allowing for easier tracing of transactions across both technologies.
Full Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages are displayed in the instance flow. The following screenshot gives you an example of how this is now viewed in 12c compared to 11g:
Figure 1.7: Oracle SOA Suite 12c now displays the full payload in the instance trace
ESS is a powerful new scheduling component that is included in the suite at no extra cost.
Note
There are too many new features to go through but an exhaustive list can be found in the following Oracle published whitepaper at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/overview/wp-soa-suite-whats-new-12c-2217186.pdf.