What is BPEL ?
Service-Oriented Architecture is not a new term in technology world. Actually it is described quite clearly by Java World in 2005 . SOA refers to distributed computing based on the request/reply design paradigm for synchronous and asynchronous applications. An application’s business logic or individual functions are modularized and presented as services for consumer/client applications. The architecture allows application can be developed without knowing the services’ underlying implementations.
SOA is well-defined and applied for a long time, there are only few frameworks that supports and utilizes SOA in a convenient way. Developing application using SOA still requires lots of work, from creating connection of service providers, generating web-service clients, lack of automated tools for developing SOA application and especially no human interaction with SOA application when required. With these disadvantages, SOA application is just another n-tier architecture, and it does not show full capability of rapid development of SOA application as supposed.
Fortunately, Oracle introduces a complete middleware application: Oracle SOA Suite 11g, which can solves the above disadvantages and make SOA application development easier than ever. Oracle SOA Suite includes:
1. Complete framework for SOA Application development from Design, Develop, Test, Deploy, and Maintenance.
2. Powerful tools for rapid development with JDeveloper 11g (latest version supported is 11.1.5.0) and SOA extension.
3. Unique concept of Human Workflow and Worklist application, which allows user interact and modify business process at runtime.
4. Fault tolerance with Fault Management framework and Compensation concept.
5. Notification and reports using Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).
and much more….
On the other hand, a few criteria needs to be addressed when using Oracle SOA Suite:
1. SOA Suite is a complete middleware framework running as a Oracle weblogic domain, then it will require complete setup from database, weblogic server and SOA Suite. The complete setup will be resources consuming. Therefore Oracle SOA Suite will be more applicable for medium to large scale project.
2. There is no debugging tools for developing SOA Application, then the only way of testing is deploy and test on server. Testing framework can make this process easier, but developer will have to look into flow trace for any error occurred.
Even with the above constraint, Oracle SOA Suite is still one of the best middleware framework for developing SOA Application.
We will cover installation of SOA suite in the next post and also we plan to write a complete tutorial or references to use SOA from bottom up. Tuned here !!!
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