Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
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First published: March 2009
Production Reference: 1120309
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 978-1-847193-55-1 www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar (
[email protected])
Credits Authors Matt Wright
Production Editorial Manager Abhijeet Deobhakta
Antony Reynolds Project Team Leader Reviewers
Lata Basantani
Jason Jones Phil McLaughlin
Project Coordinator Rajashree Hamine
Acquisition Editor Bansari Barot
Indexer Rekha Nair
Development Editor Swapna V. Verlekar
Proofreader Laura Booth
Technical Editor Gagandeep Singh
Production Coordinator Rajni R. Thorat
Editorial Team Leader Akshara Aware
Cover Work Rajni R. Thorat
Foreword Over the past several years, we have seen a growing momentum in the adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures, which continues to accelerate. At this point in its evolution, SOA has started to cross the chasm between the early-adopter, bleeding-edge IT architects and the mainstream IT and software development community. And what enables this progression to continue gathering steam is the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and lessons learned between the early adopters in the community and those following their footsteps. As such, I am very enthusiastic about Oracle SOA Suite Developer Guide because Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds are exactly the right people to share this knowledge with us. I joined Oracle in 2004 through the acquisition of Collaxa, which is where the Oracle BPEL Process Manager came from. At Collaxa, I was responsible for all the interfaces between our SOA products and our customers and the developer community. It was very clear, shortly after the acquisition, that the Oracle field was going to be a tremendous asset to the adoption of our products, our customers' success, and to the advancement of SOA in general. As Oracle became a leader in the SOA space over the next several years, building out a full SOA platform through continued development and further acquisitions, Antony and Matt continued to stand out as leaders among the special community of Oracle SOA field representatives. Along the way, they built a knowledge base that enabled customers to get over (and better yet, avoid…) common hurdles, and feed customer requirements back into the engineering organization. We are highly appreciative of the fact that they have undertaken the monumental task of incorporating this knowledge into a book that is built on the existing documentation, and will provide great value to experienced SOA practitioners and newbies alike. SOA is about more than just tools, a fact that is clear even to those of us who work for software vendors. However, to be effective with any software development products, requires detailed knowledge of the products, APIs, features, and capabilities. Antony and Matt cover these basics in this book in great detail.
But even more importantly, developers need to know about edge cases, design patterns, and how these products fit into the full development life cycle. This information comes best from real-world experiences with the products, even more than from the people who build a product. It is particularly valuable that Antony and Matt focus the majority of the content in this book on deeper topics such as SOA exception handling, full life cycle support for testing, security, and migration across environments. If I had a quarter for every customer who has asked me, over the past eight years, about best practices to move their SOA composites from dev to test to production… well, let's just say you can save your quarters and read Chapter 18 instead. Finally, even as SOA adoption matures, it is still important to understand why you are adopting SOA, what the expected benefits are, and to measure your progress toward those as objectively as possible. Today, most people state goals such as: •
Developer productivity for system-to-system integration
•
Greater interoperability between systems
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Flexibility and agility that reduces the costs associated with maintenance and changing requirements
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Service re-use
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Scalability
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Enhanced business visibility and administration
I believe that this book, coming from pragmatic practitioners in the field, will specifically help developers realize these benefits from their SOA implementations by providing clear and useful information on Oracle's SOA platform. On behalf of the Oracle SOA Engineering and Product Management team, as well as all the customers and partners who have asked for this book, we heartily thank Antony and Matt for the investment of their time and energy, and hope that this book helps you achieve your SOA goals. David Shaffer Vice President, Product Management Oracle Integration
[email protected] About the authors Matt Wright has been involved with standards-based Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA) since shortly after the initial submission of SOAP 1.1 to the W3C in 2000, and has worked with some of the early adopters of BPEL since its initial release in 2002. Since then, he has been a passionate exponent of SOA and has been engaged in some of the earliest SOA-based implementations across EMEA and APAC. He is currently a Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware in APAC, where he is responsible for working with organizations to educate and enable them in realizing the full business benefits of SOA in solving complex business problems. As a recognized authority on SOA, Matt is also responsible for evangelizing the Oracle SOA message and is a regular speaker and instructor at private and public events. He also enjoys writing and publishes his own blog (http://blogs.bpel-people.com). Matt holds a B.Sc. (Eng) in Computer Science from Imperial College, University of London.
It seems a long time ago that I first suggested to Antony that we write this book. Since that day there have been numerous twists and turns, not least the acquisition of BEA which resulted in many revisions and re-writes. Having Antony as my co-author throughout this process was invaluable; Antony's continued conviction and enthusiasm throughout was instrumental in ensuring the book finally made the light of day. Throughout this process, everyone at Oracle has been very supportive. I would like to make a special mention to Andy Gale for guiding us in the right direction when we first suggested the idea and to John Deeb for his continual support and encouragement throughout. I would also like to express my gratitude to everyone in the SOA Development team; in particular to David Shaffer, Demed L'Her, Manoj Das, Neil Wyse, Ralf Mueller, and Mohamed Ashfar who contributed to this book in many ways. A major part in the quality of any book is down to the reviewers, so I would like to say a big thank you to Phil McLaughlin, Jason Jones, and James Oliver for all their incredibly valuable feedback, which has made this a clearer and simpler book to read. The staff at Packt Publishing Pvt. Ltd. helped a great deal to make this book a reality. I would like to thank Rajashree Hamine the Project Coordinator, Swapna Verlekar the Development Editor, and Gagandeep Singh the Technical Editor. Finally, writing a book is challenging at the best of times, to do it whilst re-locating half way round the world from the UK to Australia probably isn't the best timing! So I would like to say a special thank you to my wife Natasha and my children Elliot and Kimberley for their constant support and understanding throughout this period.
Antony Reynolds has worked in the IT industry for more than 24 years,
since getting a job to maintain yield calculations for a Zinc smelter while still an undergraduate. After graduating from the University of Bristol with a degree in Maths and Computer Science he worked first for a software house, IPL in Bath, England, before joining the travel reservations system Galileo as a development team lead. At Galileo he was involved in development and maintenance of workstation products before joining the architecture group. Galileo gave him the opportunity to work in Colorado and Illinois where he developed a love for the Rockies and Chicago style deep pan pizza. He joined Oracle in 1998 as a sales consultant and has worked with a number of customers in that time, including a large retail bank's Internet banking project for which he served as chief design authority and security architect. Antony currently is lucky to work with customers on the early stages of many interesting projects, providing advice on sizing models and architecture for the SOA Suite. Outside of work Antony is a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) and is responsible for a congregation of 350. His wife and four children make sure that he also spends time with them, playing games, watching movies, and acting as an auxiliary taxi service.
I would like to thank my wife Rowan, and my four very patient children, who have put up with their husband and father disappearing into his office in the roof far too often. Several reviewers have provided invaluable advice and assistance. Phil McLaughlin of Oracle has been a constant source of encouragement and constructive criticism as the book has homed in on its target platform. Iswarya Dhandapani of Luton Borough Council took the time to try out all my code samples and identify ones which didn't work as well as providing feedback on my chapters from the view of someone who has to use SOA Suite to provide real solutions. Oracle ACE Jason Jones came a little late to the reviewing but managed to review every chapter and made clear what worked for him and what didn't. Simone Geib of Oracle Product Management provided valuable feedback on the sections covering Oracle Service Bus. I particularly appreciated the way all the reviewers not only pointed out the problems in the book but also identified the positive parts. Edwin Khodabachian is no longer with Oracle, but his team created the BPEL Process Manager at Collaxa, which was bought by Oracle and became under Edwins guidance the foundation of the SOA Suite. Finally, I would like to express appreciation to Thomas Kurian at Oracle who had the vision of a single integrated product suite, the Oracle SOA Suite, and has always been willing to listen to provide advice and guidance to me.
About the reviewers Jason Jones is a software architect specializing in SOA and Java technologies.
Since 2003, Jason has worked for Zirous, an Oracle Certified Partner, where he currently holds the position of Senior System Architect. In 2007, Jason was named an Oracle ACE Director, a prestigious international group of Oracle experts. Jason has been accepted as a speaker at Oracle OpenWorld, IOUG COLLABORATE, ODTUG Kaleidoscope, and has a published article on OTN. Jason's more than 8 years of experience in IT that includes SOA technologies such as BPEL, ESB, SOAP, WS-Security, XML, and Enterprise Java technologies such as Spring, Struts, JMS, JPA, Hibernate, and EJBs among many others. Jason is a Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP), Sun Certified Web Component Developer (SCWCD), and holds a BS in Computer Science from Iowa State University. Jason's blog can be found at realjavasoa.blogspot.com.
