Introducing Oracle SOA Suite

We begin our discussion of the Oracle SOA Suite of products (from here on referred to simply as SOA Suite) by introducing the SOA principles it is designed to facilitate. We then describe the components of SOA Suite in terms of these principles.

The Case for a SOA Platform

So far in this book the Fusion Middleware pieces we have covered—namely, WebLogic Server, the Fusion Middleware shared infrastructure, and the Identity Management components—provide a solid infrastructure on which secure Java EE applications can be built and managed. It is therefore fair to ask why another abstraction layer, such as the SOA Suite components we are about to discuss, is at all needed for the enablement of an enterprise IT infrastructure. The short answer to this question is that the SOA products provide a standard platform that facilitates the creation and management of applications that adhere to SOA principles. Therefore, to understand the benefits of SOA Suite—and, of course, to properly implement a SOA infrastructure usi....