What this book covers

Part 1: Getting Started

This section provides an initial introduction to the Oracle SOA Suite and its various components, and gives the reader a fast paced hands-on introduction to each of the key components in turn.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite: Gives an initial introduction to the Oracle SOA Suite and its various components.

Chapter 2: Writing Your First Composite: Provides a hands-on introduction to writing your first SOA composite. We then look at how we can expose this as a proxy service via the Oracle Service Bus.

Chapter 3: Service-enabling Existing Systems: Looks at a number of key technology adapters, and how we can use them to service-enable existing systems.

Chapter 4: Loosely Coupling Services: Describes how we can use the Mediator to loosely couple services within a composite and Oracle Service Bus to loosely couple services within the Enterprise.

Chapter 5: Using BPEL to Build Composite Services and Business Processes: Covers how to use BPEL to assemble services to build composite services and long-running business processes.

Chapter 6: Adding in Human Workflow: Looks at how human tasks can be managed through workflow activities embedded within a BPEL process.

Chapter 7: Using Business Rules to Define Decision Points: Covers the new Rules Editor in 11gR1, including Decision Tables and how we can incorporate rules as decision points within a BPEL Process.

Chapter 8: Using Business Events: Introduces the Event Delivery Network (EDN), a key new component in Oracle SOA Suite 11g that provides a declarative way to generate and consume business events within your SOA infrastructure.

Chapter 9: Building Real-time Dashboards: Looks at how Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can be used to give business users a real-time view into how business processes are performing.

Part 2: Putting it All Together

This section uses the example of an online auction site (oBay) to illustrate how to use the various components of the SOA Suite to implement a real-world SOA-based solution.

Chapter 10: oBay Introduction: Provides a blueprint for our SOA architecture, highlighting some of the key design considerations and describes how this fits into our architecture for oBay.

Chapter 11: Designing the Service Contract: Gives guidance on how to design XML schemas and service contracts for improved agility, reuse, and interoperability.

Chapter 12: Building Entity Services Using Service Data Objects (SDOs): Details how to use ADF-Business Components to implement Service Data Objects (SDOs) and embed them as Entity Variables within a BPEL Process.

Chapter 13: Building Validation into Services: Examines how we can implement validation within a service using XSD validation, Schematron, and Business Rules, as well as within the service.

Chapter 14: Error Handling: Examines strategies for handling system and business errors, with detailed coverage of the Composite Fault Management Framework.

Chapter 15: Advanced SOA Suite Architecture: Covers advanced SOA Architecture, including message delivery to asynchronous / synchronous composites, transaction handling, and clustering considerations.

Chapter 16: Message Interaction Patterns: Covers complex messaging interactions, including multiple requests and responses, timeouts, and message correlation (both system and business).

Chapter 17: Workflow Patterns: Looks at how to implement workflows involving complex chains of approval and how to use the Workflow Service API.

Chapter 18: Using Business Rules to Implement Services: Looks at the Rules Engine's inferencing capabilities, and how we can use them to implement types of business services.

Part 3: Other Considerations

This final section covers other considerations such as the packaging, deployment, testing, security, and administration of SOA applications.

Chapter 19: Packaging and Deployment: Examines how to package up SOA applications for deployment into environments such as test and production.

Chapter 20: Testing Composite Applications: Looks at how to create, deploy, and run test cases that automate the testing of composite applications.

Chapter 21: Defining Security and Management Policies: Details how to use policies to secure and administer SOA applications.