Foreword
First and foremost, let me say what an honor it is to participate in the great work
that Antony Reynolds and Matt Wright are doing through this Oracle SOA Suite
Developer Guide. The original edition of the book provided SOA developers with
practical tips, code examples, and under-the-covers knowledge of Oracle SOA Suite
and has received extremely positive feedback from our developer community. This
edition carries forward all of those benets, but is completely updated for the 11gR1
release of Oracle SOA Suite, which brings with it not only new features and APIs,
but also some very signicant architectural changes.
The original edition lled a very important need for the developer community,
going beyond basic documentation to provide best practices and tips and tricks for
Oracle SOA Suite developers. Antony and Matt were just the right people to create
such content, each having many years hands-on experience of enabling Oracle
SOA Suite implementations for customers and partners, as well as a close working
relationship with Oracle's SOA engineering and product management teams.
However, I believe this update for the 11gR1 release will be even more valuable
to the developer community.
With 11gR1, Oracle invested a tremendous amount of engineering work to not
just integrate, but unify the components that make up the Oracle SOA Suite. This
was done across many areas - adapters, service bus, routing, process orchestration,
business rules, B2B / partner integration, business activity monitoring, and complex
event processing. To achieve this unied experience, new micro-kernel based run-
time architecture was created, called the Service Infrastructure, and new standards
such as SCA (Service Component Architecture) were implemented. These advances
bring great benets to customers around ease-of-use, manageability and scalability;
however, there is naturally a learning curve with the new features and also new
architectural factors that come into play. For example, architects and developers
will now consider not just how to decompose their requirements into Services and
Processes, but also determine what level of granularity their SOA Composites
should be at.
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