Introduction
The rapid adoption of cloud-based applications by the enterprise, combined with organizations desire to integrate applications with mobile technologies, is dramatically increasing application integration complexity. Oracle SOA Suite 12c, the latest version of the industry’s most complete and unified application integration and SOA solution, meets this challenge. With simplified cloud, mobile, on-premises and Internet of Things (IoT) integration capabilities, all within a single platform, Oracle SOA Suite 12c delivers faster time to integration, increased productivity and lower TCO.
Oracle SOA Suite 12c enables you to:
- Reduce time to market for new project integration
- Reduce integration cost and complexity
- Efficiently manage business and technology change
- Provide end-to-end solution monitoring with root cause analysis
- Gain increased visibility to quickly react to business events
- Ensure high availability and scalability for your business infrastructure
Key Features of SOA Suite 12c
- REST/JSON support
- Built-in caching to help scale and reduce latency
- Single integration platform unifying cloud and on-premises applications
- Dedicated cloud adapters to simplify integration of most popular SaaS applications
- Extensive Web Services support
- Support for file-based exchanges through companion Managed File Transfer product
- Oracle Event Processing bridges the gap between Internet-of-Things (IoT) and SOA environments
- Extract valuable patterns from massive streams of data incoming from devices.
- High developer productivity
- Graphical editor to assemble heterogeneous components into composite applications
- Fully standard, metadata-driven
- Extreme Performance & Scalability
- Unified runtime for eventing and services
- Runs on Oracle WebLogic Server, the cornerstone of the Oracle cloud application foundation.
- Supports millions of critical transactions each day at thousands of customers around the world
- Deployable in high availability (HA) configurations and supports a number of disaster recovery setups (including Active-Active).
- BPEL Process Manager, leading stateful orchestration engine
- Human workflow
- Business Rules
- B2B
- Business Activity Monitoring
- Enterprise Scheduler
- Multi-protocol Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
- Industry’s highest performance & scalability
- Certified with 300+ application adapters for all leading applications, technologies and mainframes
- Specific B2B adapters for EDI, ebXML, RosettaNet and other industry standards
- Unifies connectivity between cloud and on-premise applications
- Unified Management & Monitoring
- Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control provides the single pane of glass to manage and monitor integration flow
- End-to-end instance tracking
- One-stop solution for systems and business exceptions management
- Centralized management of policies
- Attachment of policies at design-time or runtime
- Built-in Real-Time Visibility
- Web dashboards
- Real-time analytics
- Event processing
- Publish, share and discover services right from JDeveloper
- Dependency & impact analysis
Functional Capabilities and Components:
The functional components of Oracle SOA Suite are grouped in four broad categories: connectivity, service virtualization, orchestration & analytics as illustrated on the below diagram.
Oracle SOA Suite 12c Differentiators
Below are few Major Features introduced in 12c:
1. Jdeveloper 12c comes with the Integrated Weblogic Service with a support to deploy and test the SOA Suite 12c components.
2. New Technology Adapters: Below are the list of Adapters introduced and improved in SOA Suite 12c.
a. Cloud Adapter for integrating with Salesforce.com
b. SAP Adapter for integrating with SAP systems
c. Rest Adapter for Mobile enablement
d. Coherence Adapter integrates Coherence Cache with SCA Composites
e. LDAP Adapter to access the LDAP directory of the enterprise
f. MFT Adapter to integrate Managed File Transfer (MFT) with SOA Suite
g. MQ Adapter to integrate with IBM MQ
h. Oracle Adapter for JD Edwards World
i. The Enhanced UMS Adapter
3. Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS) 12c : ESS is part of the SOA Suite license and used to schedule jobs (using job metadata modeling). Jobs can be created and scheduled through the EM, but there is also a Java API.
4. Managed File Transfer: MFT is a simple and secure End-to-End Managed File Gateway. The main purpose of MFT is transferring files between a source and one or more targets.
5. Integration of SOA and SB development: In 11g the development environment of the SB is in OEPE (Eclipse), while the SCA Composite development environment is done in JDeveloper. In 12c both SB and SCA development is done in JDeveloper.
6. SOA Templates: Templates has been introduced in SOA Suite 12c which can be re-used at all levels within a SCA composite.Using the build-in template support you can kick-start a SCA Composite or add reusable components. There are three types of templates; SOA Project, Component and Custom Activity template. Templates are fully editable, one you apply them to you SCA Composite or BPEL component it is part of that composite or component. When you create a template all dependencies (partnerlinks) are also part of the template.
7. BPEL Sub-processes: Sub-processes allow certain business logic to be made reusable.There are two types; standalone and inline. Inline Sub-processes permits access to data (variables) of the parent process, but with a standalone Sub-process the data needs to be assigned. Sub-processes are here to improve performance (faster rendering of only entity in question) and manageability (modular approach) of BPEL processes.
8. Updated XSLT mapper and XQuery support: For the first time Jdeveloper provides the support to XQuery Mapper with SOA Suite 12c. XSLT mapper now has a better support for complex stylesheets with multiple templates, user defined functions (also recursive functions) and you can see the XSLT execution sequence.
9. File Based MDS: In addition to DB based Meta Data Store repository provided by 11g, 12c also provides access to File based MDS for use during design time.
10. MDS Support for Oracle Servce Bus Services: Service Bus has now design-time support for Meta Data Store repository.
11. Enterprise Manager for SB Services: Unlike 11g OSB services will now be and available in Enterprise Manager Console and the Service transaction can be tracked and audited in 12c.
12. In SB 12c individual activities can be disabled, this functionality will be useful if you want to skip few activities but don't don't want to delete them. Every activity can be disabled at design and run-time. In 12c SB use can access Domain Value Maps unlike 11g, where the DVM support was not available.
Oracle Documentation 12.1.3
