SOA Concept

Oracle SOA Suite provides a complete set of service infrastructure components for designing, deploying, and managing composite applications. Oracle SOA Suite enables services to be created, managed, and orchestrated into composite applications
and business processes. Composites enable you to easily assemble multiple technology
components into one SOA composite application. Oracle SOA Suite plugs into
heterogeneous IT infrastructures and enables enterprises to incrementally adopt SOA.
The components of the suite benefit from common capabilities including a single
deployment and management model and tooling, end-to-end security, and unified
metadata management. Oracle SOA Suite is unique in that it provides the following
set of integrated capabilities:

■ Messaging
■ Service discovery
■ Orchestration
■ Activity monitoring
■ Web services management and security
■ Business rules
■ Events framework
■ Complex event processing

Oracle SOA Suite puts a strong emphasis on standards and interoperability. Among
the standards it leverages are:

■ Service Component Architecture (SCA) assembly model — Provides the service details and their interdependencies to form composite applications. SCA enables you to represent business logic as reusable service components that can be easily integrated into any SCA-compliant application. The resulting application is known as an SOA composite application. The specification for the SCA standard is maintained by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) .

■ Service Data Objects (SDO) — Specifies a standard data method and can modify business data regardless of how it is physically accessed. Knowledge is not required about how to access a particular back-end data source to use SDO in an SOA composite application. Consequently, you can use static or dynamic programming styles and obtain connected and disconnected access.

■ Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) — Provides enterprises with an industry standard for business process orchestration and execution. Using BPEL, you design a business process that integrates a series of discrete services into an end-to-end process flow. This integration reduces process cost and complexity.

■ XSL Transformations (XSLT) — Processes XML documents and transforms
document data from one XML schema to another.

■ Java Connector Architecture (JCA) — Provides a Java technology solution to the problem of connectivity between the many application servers in EnterpriseInformation Systems (EIS).

■ Java Messaging Service (JMS) — Provides a messaging standard that allows
application components based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) to access business logic distributed among heterogeneous systems.

■ Web Service Description Language (WSDL) file — Provides the entry points into an SOA composite application. The WSDL file provides a standard contract language and is central for understanding the capabilities of a service.

■ Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) — Provides the default network protocol for message delivery.