Who this book is for

Some say experience is something you don't get until you stop needing it. This book is what an established professional of today would have wanted to read at least ten years ago. Here you will find my combined experience of at least 15 large-scale service-oriented projects in three industries. Successful implementations were recognized by not only clients, but also Oracle. I really admire the skills and ingenuity of professionals who have worked together on the implementation of the described concepts. I believe that the presented materials will be useful for experts working at different levels:

If you are looking for study materials on the SOA architecture to pass the vendor-neutral exams (such as SOACP SOASchool; http://www.soaschool.com/), this book should be sufficient to attain the Certified SOA Architect status. In fact, having the Certified Trainer status, we were asked several times to prepare for combined SOA school lectures, which condensed SOA architecture, analytics, and security courses into a one-week intensive training for experienced architects. In many aspects, Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform is the lecture material we use for these purposes. We should also mention that we use these materials actively in our day-to-day activities.

Please bear in mind that despite the numerous technical examples, this is not a Cookbook or Programmer's Guide (such as http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-service-bus-11g-development-cookbook/book). You can find plenty of them for every Oracle product we use in this book on the official Packt Publishing website. For a better understanding of the presented materials and examples, you must be familiar with the SCA concept (in particular, BPEL and Mediator), Rule Engines, and Oracle Service Bus (the implementation of proxies is a must). The common prerequisites include some Java skills (EJB and Servlets), XML, and PL/SQL. Nevertheless, we strive to present all the concepts in the most comprehensive manner and you will find plenty of references to the Oracle documentation and best practices.

Staying focused on the Agnostic Composition controllers, we had to rationalize the set of tools, excluding some really interesting ones such as Oracle BPM Suite. Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to put all Oracle products from the Fusion Middleware stack into a single book; please see related books on the publisher's site.