SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come
together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although
the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is
based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the
Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM.
SCA,
as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts
of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the
separation of application and business logic are maintained.
Orchestration or Integration?
A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either
build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be
service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like
BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration
tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job
and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember
that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that
doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it.
Service Integration is
the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually
results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your
customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product
ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service
and a payment processing service.
Process Orchestration, however,
is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally
exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end
business process. This might include the earlier example of a product
ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human
task to handle edge-cases.
A good (but not exhaustive)
rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be
real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might
comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or
have to wait pending manual intervention.
BPEL vs BPMN
For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this
decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new
projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using
Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite
and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they
offer.
Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has
both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component
“Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made,
therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are
to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line.
Design for performance: Read the complete article here.
SOA & BPM Partner Community
For
regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA
& BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.
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