Chapter 3. Oracle Fusion Middleware and SOA Suite 11g

St. Matthews is facing several real business challenges, as we have seen in the previous chapter. The hospital has well-defined views as to how to approach these challenges from the business perspective as well as the implementation or technological perspective. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an overarching design principle is a key element in this approach. To apply the concepts laid down in St. Matthews’ architecture blueprints, the hospital needs to put in place a technology stack that supports those architectural concepts. Chapter 2 made the opening moves in this direction.

St. Matthews has evaluated a number of SOA and middleware offerings from various vendors—including open-source products—and has picked Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) as its preferred stack. Among the selection criteria, support for open industry standards ranked very highly, along with product functionality, operational (administration) effort, and maturity. Because it is a long-running and rather satisfied user of Oracle technology—RDBMS and various tools, including Oracle Forms—the IT staff at St. Matthews has a natural bias toward the Oracle Fusion Middleware offering. It hopes and expects that FMW will offer additional advantages, such as even better integration with the Oracle technologies already in use (for example, PL/SQL), that alternative products wouldn’t provide, in addition to a smoother learning curve based on the current skill set.