Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Getting started with Oracle SOA, BPEL, ESB, AIA

As I do SOA projects for a few years, many users are just entering this service oriented architecture world. For me the technology is common sense and I expect often that SOA/BPEL/ESB is well known. But off-course this is not the case. When I started working with SOA/BPEL/ESB it was, and still is, a steep learning curve. The Oracle developers world comes from a traditional approach; thinking in functions and entities and since Java came to us, we are even thinking about objects and inherited them.

With SOA it is different, you have to think about processes; functional and technical. The gap between the functional people and technical people is reduced. Processes are part of the business, otherwise they do not have any reason for existence. While processes are running, the can fail, wait on other process, they finish, started, run in parallel etc. So SOA is a mind shift from the traditional development approach point of view.

Last year Oracle announce the Oracle Application Integration Architecture. This is an add-on on the Oracle SOA Suite, which defines an abstract message layer that can be used to interface various systems; Siebel / SAP / Protal BRM / Cordys via a centralized system (Oracle SOA + AIA). This messages layers are created specific for different industries, for example the telecommunication market.

To start with Oracle SOA here are some of useful links:

Oracle SOA Suite general

Oracle SOA Suite software

Oracle Application Integration Architecture
DocumentationInstallation
Performance
API
Tutorials
Oracle Blogs
Oracle Forum
Oracle General
Useful tools
Webservice standards

4 comments:

Diego Pires Plentz said...

Great post Marc!

Direct link to patch set:

http://updates.oracle.com/ARULink/PatchDetails/process_form?patch_num=6148874

Anonymous said...

Hi Mark,

Very good article. I am developing software for past 10 years using java and going to take other opportunity where I will be using Oracle Fusion (BPEL, ESB etc).

What will be career path in Fusion? I see most of the opportunity in consulting. I do not like traveling. Do you think I will get enough Full time opportunities in future?

Thanks
Mark F

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for taking time and posting the links. I am absolutely new to SOA world. Of all the links, which ones will be the good ones for me to start. I desperately need to find one end from a ball of yarn. Will be eagerly expecting your reply.

safia(safiajsub@yahoo.com)

Albert said...

Hallo Mark Kelderman,

Ik heb gisteren en vandaag naar je Blog gekeken en ik moet zeggen dat dat een zinvolle blog is voor mij temeer omdat ik zelf meer ins en outs van SOA ga verdiepen en poberen uit te werken. Dank voor deze inzage in de ins en outs van SOA