Book review : Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide

Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide

Finally i had some spare time to read this nice book!
It’s real bookshelf filler with 621 pages.

The book already got released before fusion 11g went live, but it was still nice to get some more information about the ‘old’ soa-suite stack.
Over at IT-eye we did quiet some soa implementations with the Oracle stack, so i already had good background on the information discussed in the book.
What i particularly was interested in was the best practices of others on the different components of the soa suite. When we start a project at IT-eye we have a default set of best practices and ways to go on how to implement certain functionality.
Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds gave a good overview of how to use the different components and what Oracles/their best use was for them.

Oracle also provides the Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide as free guide on this internet, but this book discusses a lot of extra/advanced topics on the soa suite.
So i would recommend to read both to learn more and more about all the ins and outs of the soa suite. Since it delivers a lot of components in the stack, these 2 will give you a lot of good information.

Let’s go on with the book.

The book starts with a few topics with some basic information about the soa suite, the standards/frameworks which are used.
After that the components of the stack are getting discussed, writing your first bpel, implementing human workflow, adding bussines rules and building bam dashboards.

For starters the way to go. Get your hands dirty and just try to develop everything which is discussed in the book.
The authors explain it all real well, so it’s good step by step manual to get a feeling with all what the soa suite provides us.

Besides the real technical topics it gives some good information about the design concepts to implement (service enable existing systems, how too loosely couple services, design service contracts, good explanation about xsd schemas/wsdl and how to construct them).

To bring all of these topics in practise they added a use case called oBay. This one will be used in the whole book to implement all the functionality of the stack.
From developing the basics, adding rules, secure service invocations till testing and deployment, all will be reviewed.

And i was very pleased to see they even added the ‘new’ Oracle Service Bus (OSB) as subject of discussion to the book. They didn’t just added a topic for it, but after discussing every component in the soa suite stack, they added some extra information on how to implement this in the Oracle Service Bus. Sort of one on one compair to see what functionality is available in the new bus, good one!

Conclusion

I would really recommend this book to anyone who’s starting or already busy with the Oracle SOA Suite. The book discusses the 10g soa suite stack, but part of the components will be available as is, in the new fusion 11g stack. For example the implementation of Oracle Webservice Manager will be different.
Although there is a lot of information to read, it’s still all that well written it won’t take ages to finish it. The authors explain all very well by using good screengrabs and examples, so what i would recommend is to start up the soa suite, and get the hands on experience pon the topics the authors try to inform you about.

Book details

Contens

Section 1 Getting Started

• Chapter 1: Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite: An initial introduction to the Oracle SOA Suite and its various components.
• Chapter 2: Writing your first service: A hands-on introduction to the core components of the Oracle SOA Suite, namely the Oracle BPEL Process Manager and the Oracle Service Bus.
• Chapter 3: Service-enabling existing systems: Looks at a number of key technology adapters and how we can use them to service-enable existing systems.
• Chapter 4: Loosely coupling services: Describes how we can use the Oracle Service Bus to build services that are implementation-agnostic.
• Chapter 5: Building composite services and business processes: Covers how to use BPEL to assemble services to build composite services and long-running business process.
• Chapter 6: Adding in human workflow: This chapter looks at how human tasks can be managed through workflow activities embedded within a BPEL process.
• Chapter 7: Using business rules to define decision points: This chapter introduces business rules and how we can use them to externalize “decision points” in a BPEL process.
• Chapter 8: Building real-time dashboards: This chapter looks at how Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can be used to give business users a real-time view into how business processes are performing.

Section 2 Putting it all together

• Chapter 9: oBay introduction: Provides a blueprint for our SOA architecture, highlighting some of the key design considerations and describing how they fit our architecture for oBay.
• Chapter 10: Designing the service contract: Gives guidance on how to design XML schemas and service contracts for improved agility, reuse, and interoperability.
• Chapter 11: Building business services: Examines different approaches for building new business services either from scratch or by re-using existing logic.
• Chapter 12: Building validation into services: Examines how we can implement validation within a service using XSD validation, Schematron, and Business Rules.
• Chapter 13: Error handling: This chapter examines strategies for handling system and business errors, with detailed coverage of the BPEL Fault Management Framework.
• Chapter 14: Message interaction patterns: Covers complex messaging interactions, including multiple requests and responses, timeouts, and message correlation (both system and business).
• Chapter 15: Workflow patterns: Looks at how to implement workflows involving complex chains of approval and how to use the Workflow Service API.
• Chapter 16: Using business rules to implement services: Here we look at the Rules engine’s inferencing capabilities, and how we can use them to implement types of business services.
• Chapter 17: The importance of bindings: Looks at the protocols available in addition to SOAP over HTTP for invoking web services and the advantages they provide.

Section 3 Other considerations

• Chapter 18: Packaging and deployment: Examines how to package up a SOA application for deployment into environments such as test and production.
• Chapter 19: Testing composite applications: Looks at how to create, deploy, and run test cases that automate the testing of composite applications.
• Chapter 20: Defining security and management policies: Details how to use Web Service Manager to secure and administer SOA applications.

You can order the book at Packt
Original blog