The demands of the modern world require complex IT landscapes with various disparate systems, applications, and multiple platforms. The need to integrate with cloud platforms, mobile-enabled the existing applications, and begin developments on the latest trends by connecting the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the current infrastructure comprises the main focus of organizations.
The effective SOA framework brings together the on-premise and cloud deployments to ensure the perfect flexibility of the organization. The overall development helps to orchestrate the services of diverse systems. This is where Oracle OSA comes in. It stands among the dominant middleware platforms in the market. It is the most popular platform for complex application integrations.
What is Oracle SOA?
Oracle SOA Suite enables the developers to build the services and manage them. The services can then be applied to the business processes and composite applications. Organizations can easily extend and evolve the architectures with the hot-pluggable components from Oracle SOA Suite. Replacing existing investments would not be required. The product strategy, product details, and customer experience relating to the SOA Suite are shared by Oracle Corporation.
The release of the Oracle SOA Suite 12c was announced in June 2014, which is the latest version at present. It promised simplified mobile, cloud, on-premises, and Internet of Things (IoT) integration capabilities. The latest version available at present is Oracle SOA Suite 12.2.1.3.0. The QuickStart version for the generic platform and the other platforms meant for the cloud integrations are available as well.
The development of the Oracle SOA Suite was done to cope with the goals of infrastructure flexibility, business integration, increased applications, and reduced costs. The disparate requirements of cloud, mobile, and IoT integration are simplified by the products into a unified and standards-based platform. The Oracle SOA Suite 12c enables you to get certain benefits. They are as follows.
Reduce the integration cost and complexity
Reduce the time to market for new project integration, and efficiently manage the technological changes and business
The increased visibility can be gained to react to business events
Provide end-to-end solution monitoring with root cause analysis
Ensure scalability and high availability for the business infrastructure
Why SOA?
The IT firms should be able to face the challenge of taking on an array of software systems that might not be compatible. The IT companies might even have to face the demands put forward by a wide array of customers. Customers are accessing products and services through online interfaces and are a part of a supply chain where the cost and time of production need to be decreased. This is why IT companies are always looking for solutions to meet the demands.
But, why is the technology surfacing only now? One of the main necessities to build a system is to have a standard for representing the software parts. Though SOA is not something entirely new, there have been many standards set up by the Internet, like HTTP and HTML. Businesses that have witnessed the growth of the Internet are using similar principles to get the computer systems linked.
How the concept of SOA influence technology?
Though SOA is not a technological concept, the idea has been adopted by technologists. The concept of software services has been established through this. It is performed by a software program.
The efforts offer value to the people or organizations that consume their products. The software services can be provided over the Internet. The services on the web could have virtual interfaces. The internal networks of enterprises can be used for delivering software services.
There are major benefits earned by the use of services, and they are as follows.
The large applications are much like 'information silos' where a ready exchange of information is often not possible. Fine-grained software services offer a better and refined flow of information between the companies. While the major applications prove to be costly, SOA is very inexpensive in terms of integration.
If the internal software is organized as services, exposing the functionality externally is easier. The increased visibility would offer business value. This can help increase customer satisfaction and reduce overhead costs.
The supporting software makes the businesses rely on them. The large and singular programs can be hard to change as the lack of modularity would make it difficult for enterprises to meet new changes. It might even lead to the inability to take advantage of new opportunities. A software architecture based on services is easy to change as it would offer better organizational benefits and help to avoid penalties.
Why you should use Oracle SOA
Re-use of ServicesCosts involved in testing and developments can be lowered by the use of existing software modules rather than writing new ones. This would ensure lower maintenance costs and better savings.
1.Messaging: The use of messaging would enable services to move between the computer systems inside the enterprise. The externally-provided services would be easy to use. The messages handled by the services can be changed to meet the new demands or the performance can be tuned.
2.Message Security: Message security involves data integrity by the addition of cryptographic integrity-check fields and data confidentiality by encryption of messages.
3.Complex Event Processing:
Complex Event Processing offers benefits like
Ability to adapt to the different scenarios: the focus needs to be put in the logic that connects the scenarios to the business events
Simplification of the software architecture: removing functionalities from the business software services that are not related
The improvement of security and management: security event detection and performance measurement are keys.
SOA Features
Oracle SOA has a series of features that help in integration with the other platforms. The unified platform meets the growing demands of faster business integration. The Suite can support all the technology trends of today. The adapters are classified into different categories like enterprise application, CDC and mainframe, cloud, and the SOA Suite Adapters depending on the systems and applications.
1. Cloud Integration Adapters
One of the most exciting features involves the Oracle cloud adapters that offer simplified connectivity with SaaS applications through the processing options and design-time wizards. There had been room for improvements that require architecture for web services and the cloud adaptor configuration wizard, and adapter SDK i.e. the Software Development Kit does the job.
The SDK allows the users to use the new SaaS applications as a part of the business processes of the companies. Run time and design time components are offered by the SDK. The run time APIs include security API, session API, and transformation API. The design-time components include metadata browsing, connection API, artifact generation, and query support.
A simplified view of the business object is offered by the cloud adapter configuration wizard. The users can browse the services and objects and select them to perform the supported operations. The adapter can be used to distinguish between the objects and the applications. Oracle cloud adapters validate and provide the design time query editor and test the queries. Test cycles are shortened when they are integrated with applications.
The cloud integration adapters from Oracle even enhance the complexity and improve the time of data mapping. The significance of integrating with SaaS applications like handling complex web services description language or session management can be addressed within the adapter instead of exposing the user to the issues.
2. Tighter Integration and Unified Interface of the Components
Though the Oracle SOA 11g was quite unified in its interfaces, the Suite 12c has a unified interface over all the components.
3. Unified Run-Time & Design Time Environments
The Oracle WebLogic Server offers a platform for the Oracle SOA Suite. The integrating components offer reliable integration. Oracle allows the deployment of more applications per server, reducing the hardware and energy costs as well as software licensing. The JDeveloper tool from Oracle SOA Suite would support the tools and technologies within a customizable yet single user interface. JDeveloper is integrated with the SOA Suite, allowing the users to deploy without a hitch in the test environments. Only one tool is needed which reduces the need for integration.
4. End to End Monitoring
It is of crucial importance to keep a not of what is happening in the application servers and the occupant applications and scale applications when necessary for managing the integration. The SOA management plugin and Oracle Enterprise Manager offers the capabilities in a web console. The users can browse applications, servers, and service engines to troubleshoot the run time problems in SOA. The Enterprise Manager works with the Oracle Web Services Manager to define and apply security policies for the components and services.
5. Prebuilt Integration
To minimize the job of the users from design to deployment in implementing the new interfaces, prebuilt integrations are offered by Oracle. The users can look for the business objects and select them and deploy these without getting tangled with the technical details. The innate integrations or the modified ones can be used to meet the project schedules and the specifications.
Benefits of SOA
Service-Oriented Architecture, as a primitive goal, helps to align the businesses with the technologies. This means greater business agility, extensible and flexible architecture, enhanced workflows, and better life of the applications. Thus, there can be significant benefits of SOA, and they are mentioned below.
1. Location Transparency
Location transparency is a term that describes that the consumers of a certain service would not worry about the place of implementation of the services. The server could be the same or one that is halfway across the world. The consumer calls do not interfere with the service location.
. Loose coupling
The principles of loose coupling are very crucial in the field of SOA with applications based on information technology. This involves avoidance or encapsulation of technological, temporal, and organizational constraints in the design of information systems.
Dynamic binding or late binding is supported by a loosely coupled system. It can mediate the difference in the security model and the structure of the component, semantics and protocols, which means volatility can be abstracted.
Services can be implemented with the help of loose coupling with any significant impact on other services or applications. The interaction that would take place between the services and the application would be through the publish interfaces. This frees the application from worrying about service implementation.
3. Parallel Development
The advocation of more parallelism takes place in the development of the services as SOA uses a layer-based architecture. The contract-based services that are present in the inventory of SOA are independent and parallel development is possible.
4. Rich Testability
The layer-based architecture that is conferred by SOA allows testing to be broken into definable testing areas like security, services, and governance. The testing areas would be separate using the right tools and approach.
Test suites can be created with NUnit and JUnit, for instance. A number of procedures are contained in the test suites, which are designed for testing the components and services. Automation of testing helps to bring modifications to the enterprise services that improve the efficiency of regression testing.
5. Better Scalability and Higher Availability
Individual clustering is possible with SOA allowing appropriate balancing of load that scales the system up. SOA can achieve redundancy through the introduction of redundant elements through the method of clustering and this redundancy holds the key to higher availability.
6. Reusability
Compliance to the web services means that applications executing on a platform would be able to consume the services from another, facilitating reuse. If SOA applications are implemented properly, it is possible to reuse services in heterogeneous environments like Java, C, C++, .Net, and others.