Operating Systems: Enterprise Application Integration with Oracle SOA Suite

Based on industry standards, Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive suite of software tools for creating, deploying, and managing SOA applications.

• By Mensah Alkebu-Lan
• 07 December 2023

5/8: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) structures applications as a set of services that can be invoked by other applications or services. IBM SOA Foundation, Oracle SOA Suite, and Microsoft BizTalk Server are popular examples of SOA.

— Google Cloud Architect (@gcpexpert) April 3, 2023

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Enterprise Application Integration
• Oracle SOA Suite
• References
  
  

Overview

Service oriented architecture (SOA) stands as a testament to modern software architectural design that empowers application development by harnessing the power of services. It can integrate existing standalone applications using a standards-based approach. It encourages a distributed application model comprising presentation layers, business logic, and data persistence. It is a way to define and provision an IT Infrastructure to allow multiple applications to exchange data and participate in business processes, regardless of the operating systems or programming languages underlying those operations.

The four main elements of SOA are application frontend, service repository, service, and service bus. A service in the SOA context consists of a contract, one or more interfaces, and an implementation. They are coarse-grained as well as possessing several other attributes. One way of looking at a service in this context is as a building block for service-oriented applications.

People often use the two terms interchangeably, but SOA is not synonymous with XML webservices. XML web services are just one of the ways an SOA can be implemented.

Enterprise Application Integration

SOA is a favored solution for tasks such as integrating business applications. This is a concept known as enterprise application integration (EAI).

The way EAI is implemented is all communication between applications is facilitated by a message broker. This way, organizations are able to address the increased complexity when a new application needs to communicate and share data with all the other services.

EAI can address the anticipated complexities that arise from the modularization of multiple systems such as those used to manage customer relationships, supply chain, or product information. It can overcome the limitations of point-to-point integration.

Oracle SOA Suite

Based on industry standards, Oracle SOA Suite is a comprehensive suite of software tools for creating, deploying, and managing SOA applications. Within this integration platform is a unified runtime environment with several services engines. One of these service engines is a business process execution language (BPEL) engine.

Another one of the several components of Oracle SOA Suite is Oracle Service Bus (OSB). This enterprise service bus (ESB) is a stateless, synchronous request/response engine that is a very fast, uniform intermediary between service consumers and heterogeneous services and backend systems. Among other things, OSB can provide a variety of ways to connect new applications, services or external partners in the bus using a wide variety of service endpoints or adapters when needed. It acts as a service virtualization and mediation layer within the unified runtime.

BPEL engines and ESBs can connect to adapters to integrate backend packaged applications with a process flow by invoking web services using Java Connector Architecture (JCA) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

Contact us for more information on our enterprise application integration services.

References

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3. Mylläri, Elena. “Introducing REST Based API Management and Its Relationship to Existing SOAP Based Systems.” (2022).
4. Μπαστούνης, Νικόλαος. “IBM ESB vs Oracle OSB: detailed comparison of two major SOA products.” (2022).
5. Bayram, Serdal. “Always-On Enterprise Information Systems With Service-Oriented Architecture and Load Balancing.” Always-On Enterprise Information Systems for Modern Organizations. IGI Global, 2018. 208-230.
6. Chmielewski, Michal, and Yogesh Kumar. “System and method for supporting javascript as an expression language in a process defined by a process execution language for execution in a SOA middleware environment.” U.S. Patent No. 10,223,143. 5 Mar. 2019.
7. Sultanbekova, A. S., and A. T. Kaimov. “ENTERPRISE BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT BASED ON ORACLE BPM SUITE.” ВЕСТНИК КазНТУ (2015): 383.
8. Hassan, Qusay F. “SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE: KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL ADOPTION AND IMPLEMENTATION.” Annals. Computer Science Series 11.2 (2013).
9. Palanisamy, Muthukumar S., et al. “System and method for harvesting metadata into a service metadata repository.” U.S. Patent No. 9,171,096. 27 Oct. 2015.
10. Fernandez, Eduardo B., et al. “Web services security.” Web Services Security Development and Architecture: Theoretical and Practical Issues: Theoretical and Practical Issues (2010): 152.
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