News

Oracle moves beyond the bundle for SOA

• By Kathleen Richards
• September 1, 2006

Oracle's latest version of its SOA Suite offers substantial upgrades to the January 2006 release. The key enhancement, available now to developers in a preview, is integration of all the components into a "cohesive" platform—BPEL Process Manager (Web services orchestration engine), Enterprise Service Bus, Web Services Manager, Business Rules Engine, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and a Service Registry.

The current suite is a bundled offering. Oracle describes the Java suite as "hot pluggable" because, in addition Oracle's app server, it works with IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, JBOSS, and other apps.

"The new suite is a single install for developers. They can download it and install it within 15 minutes," says Ashish Mohindroo, senior product director, Oracle Fusion Middleware. "That's a big advantage."

In addition to the integration, all of the suite components have been enhanced, according to Oracle. Some key enhancements include: new testing and human-to-human workflow capabilities in the BPEL Process Manager; federated monitoring, standards-based messaging, routing and transformations in the ESB, and UDDI 3.0 support in the Service Registry.

The JDeveloper 10g IDE, available as a separate download, is also integrated with extensions for the SOA Suite. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Designer enables drag-and-drop design of BPEL business process, and users can associate business rules within the process. Similarly, an ESB Designer extension facilitates graphical drag and drop modeling of message flows and other services. JDeveloper now supports the final spec for Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, which includes the Java persistent API, and XSLT mapping.

The Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.1 Developer Preview for Windows or Linux is free for download. The final release is expected this fall. Oracle will maintain the same pricing, says Mohindroo.