Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer's Guide

Index

Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer's Guide

Antony Reynolds

Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer's Guide

Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing

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First published: June 2010

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Credits

Authors

Antony Reynolds

Matt Wright

Reviewers

John Deeb

Hans Forbrich

Bill Hicks

Marc Kelderman

Manoj Neelapu

ShuXuan Nie

Hajo Normann

Acquisition Editor

James Lumsden

Development Editor

Swapna Verlekar

Technical Editors

Gauri Iyer

Hyacintha D'Souza

Smita Solanki

Alfred John

Copy Editor

Leonard D'Silva

Editorial Team Leader

Aanchal Kumar

Project Team Leader

Priya Mukherji

Project Coordinator

Prasad Rai

Proofreader

Aaron Nash

Indexer

Hemangini Bari

Graphics

Geetanjali Sawant

Production Coordinator

Shantanu Zagade

Cover Work

Shantanu Zagade

Foreword

First and foremost, let me say what an honor it is to participate in the great work that Antony Reynolds and Matt Wright are doing through this Oracle SOA Suite Developer Guide. The original edition of the book provided SOA developers with practical tips, code examples, and under-the-covers knowledge of Oracle SOA Suite and has received extremely positive feedback from our developer community. This edition carries forward all of those benefits, but is completely updated for the 11gR1 release of Oracle SOA Suite, which brings with it not only new features and APIs, but also some very significant architectural changes.

The original edition filled a very important need for the developer community, going beyond basic documentation to provide best practices and tips and tricks for Oracle SOA Suite developers. Antony and Matt were just the right people to create such content, each having many years hands-on experience of enabling Oracle SOA Suite implementations for customers and partners, as well as a close working relationship with Oracle's SOA engineering and product management teams. However, I believe this update for the 11gR1 release will be even more valuable to the developer community.

With 11gR1, Oracle invested a tremendous amount of engineering work to not just integrate, but unify the components that make up the Oracle SOA Suite. This was done across many areas - adapters, service bus, routing, process orchestration, business rules, B2B / partner integration, business activity monitoring, and complex event processing. To achieve this unified experience, new micro-kernel based run-time architecture was created, called the Service Infrastructure, and new standards such as SCA (Service Component Architecture) were implemented. These advances bring great benefits to customers around ease-of-use, manageability and scalability; however, there is naturally a learning curve with the new features and also new architectural factors that come into play. For example, architects and developers will now consider not just how to decompose their requirements into Services and Processes, but also determine what level of granularity their SOA Composites should be at.

As such, besides the many updates and descriptions of new components, Antony and Matt have also added critically valuable new content on advanced SOA architecture considerations. I believe that this alone will make this book uniquely useful for Oracle SOA Suite developers.

Especially coming so soon after the 11gR1 release, the updated content in this book, including areas such as exception handling, testing, security and operational automation, will surely be invaluable to anyone working with Oracle SOA Suite. But even more difficult to find is the information that Matt and Antony have from working with customer implementations around edge cases, design patterns, and how these products best fit into the full development lifecycle. This kind of information comes only from real-world project experience, such as Antony and Matt have.

I believe that this book will help developers realize their goals with the Oracle SOA Suite, helping them increase productivity, avoid common pitfalls, and improve ROI through more scalable, agile, and re-usable implementations. 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 updated edition help you achieve your goals with the Oracle SOA Suite.

David Shaffer

Vice President, Product Management

Oracle Integration

<david.shaffer@oracle.com>

About the Authors

Antony Reynolds has worked in the IT industry for more than 25 years, after 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 Mathematics 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 the 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 the chief design authority and security architect.

After the publication of his previous book, the SOA Suite 10g Developers Guide, Antony changed roles within Oracle, taking a position in the global customer support organization. As part of this change of position he moved from a small village outside Bristol, England to a small town outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is now acclimatized to living at 7,500ft and has learnt to survive on less oxygen.

Within support, Antony deals with customers who have problems with large complex SOA deployments, often working as an advisor to other support analysts. Antony also has a role in training support analysts in SOA principles and details of the Oracle SOA Suite.

Outside of work Antony helps with scouting at church, which gives him the opportunity to spend time with his two eldest sons. 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. Antony is a slow but steady runner and can often be seen jogging up and down the trails in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my wife Rowan, and my four very patient children, who have put up with my staying at home on family trips and working late nights in my basement office. My colleagues in support have often volunteered to be reviewers of material and have been the unwitting guinea pigs of new explanations. The reviewers have provided invaluable advice and assistance, challenging me to explain myself better and expand more on key points.

Matt has been a constant source of enthusiasm and energy and with Prasad and Swapna at Packt has helped keep me to some sort of schedule.

Finally, thank you to the development team at Oracle under Amlan Debnath, who have enhanced and improved the SOA Suite product significantly in this release. I would particularly like to mention Clemens Utschig, who has expanded my understanding of SOA Suite internals and without whom Chapter 15 in particular would be much less complete.

Matt Wright is a director at Rubicon Red, an independent consulting firm helping customers enable enterprise agility and operational excellence through the adoption of emerging technologies such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM), and Cloud Computing.

With over 20 years experience in building enterprise scale distributed systems, Matt first became involved with SOA 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 engaged in some of the earliest SOA-based implementations across EMEA and APAC.

Prior to Rubicon Red, Matt held various senior roles within Oracle, most recently as Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware in APAC, where he was 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 a regular speaker and instructor at private and public events. He also enjoys writing and publishes his own blog (http://blog.rubiconred.com). Matt holds a B.Sc. (Eng) in Computer Science from Imperial College, University of London.

Acknowledgement

Well, this is the book that Antony and I originally intended to write, when we first put pen to paper (or finger to keypad) back in May 2007. At this point the 11gR1 version of the Oracle SOA Suite was still in the initial stages of development, with the goal being to time the publication of the book with the release of 11gR1. Then in early 2008 Oracle announced the acquisition of BEA, which it finalized in July; at this point future timings around the release of 11gR1 were very much up in the air.

By this stage a significant amount of the book was already written, and we had received some really positive feedback from the initial reviews. With this in mind, Antony and I took the decision to retarget the book for the current 10gR3 release and bring in the Oracle Service Bus (formally known as the BEA Aqualogic Service Bus).

The first version of the book was published in March 2009, almost two years after our original start date, and much to the relief of anyone closely connected with Antony or I. Then in July, Oracle announced the release of the Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1, Antony and I blinked and then decided to write the 11gR1 version of the book, in many ways it was unfinished business!

So while this edition has been produced significantly quicker, it's still almost three years since we began this journey; a journey that we would not have been able to complete without the support of many others. First, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone at Oracle who played a part; in particular to David Shaffer, Demed L'Her, Prasen Palvankar, Heidi Buelow, Manoj Das, Neil Wyse, Ralf Mueller, Mohamed Ashfar, Andy Gale and all the members of the SOA Development Team.

I would also like to express my deep appreciation to everyone who has reviewed this book, the original reviewers: Phil McLaughlin, Jason Jones and James Oliver. Also the reviewers who helped with this edition: Bill Hicks, Normann Hajo, Manoj Neelapu, Hans Forbrich, Shu Xuan Nie, Marc Kelderman and John Deeb. Their invaluable feedback and advice not only helped to validate the overall accuracy of the content, but more importantly ensure its clarity and readability.

A book like this doesn't make it into print without a lot of work from the publisher. I would like to thank the team at Packt Publishing for all their support; especially James Lumsden, Swapna Verlekar, and Prasad Rai.

A special mention must go to John Deeb, for his continual encouragement, input and above all support in ensuring that I found time to write the book. I couldn't ask for a more supportive friend and business partner.

Finally, I would like to say a very, very special thank you to my wife Natasha and my children Elliot and Kimberley, who for the past three years have been incredibly patient and supportive in allowing me to spend far too many evenings and weekends stuck away in my office writing these books.

About the Reviewers

John Deeb is a director at Rubicon Red, an independent consulting firm helping customers enable enterprise agility and operational excellence through the adoption of emerging technologies such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM), and Cloud Computing.

Prior to Rubicon Red, John held senior product management positions at Oracle and TIBCO Software. His areas of focus include enterprise integration, business process management, and business activity monitoring. John has worked with organizations to educate and enable them in realizing the full business benefits of BPM and SOA in solving complex business problems.

John holds a Bachelors degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Queensland and a Masters degree in IT from the Queensland University of Technology. He is a regular speaker on middleware vision, strategy, and architecture.

Hans Forbrich is a well-known member of the Oracle Community. He started with Oracle products in 1984 and has kept abreast of nearly all of Oracle's Core Technologies. As ACE Director, Hans has been invited to be present at Oracle Open World and various Oracle User Group meetings around the world. His company, Forbrich Computer Consulting Ltd., is well established in western Canada. Hans specializes in delivering Oracle University training through Oracle University and partners such as Exit Certified.

Although his special interests include Oracle Spatial, OracleVM, and Oracle Enterprise Linux, Hans has been particularly excited about the advances in Oracle SOA, Oracle Web Logic, and Oracle Grid Control.

Hans has been technical reviewer for a number of Packt books, including Mastering Oracle Scheduler in Oracle 11g Databases, Oracle 10g/11g Data and Database Management Utilities, and Oracle VM Manager 2.1.2.

I wish to thank my wife Susanne, and the Edmonton Opera, for their patience while I worked on these reviews as well as on my own book.

Bill Hicks is a Senior Sales Consulting Manager for Australia and New Zealand, specializing in Oracles' Middleware products.

Over the last 11 years at Oracle, Bill has held various positions within Sales Consulting and Support.

His current focus is on Service-oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing and how the varied Oracle Middleware product offerings can be utilized to deliver flexible, cost effective, and complete business solutions.

Marc Kelderman is working for Oracle Netherlands as a solution architect. He started his career at Oracle in 1995 working in consulting. His broad knowledge of Oracle products and IT technology helped making the projects he is involved to be successful. Since 2005, he is implementing and has designed projects based on Oracle SOA technology. From that period he started to share his solutions to a broader audience via his blog (http://orasoa.blogspot.com). Marc is often called for as a speaker at seminars.

I would like to thank Matt and Antony for giving me the opportunity to review their book. Good work!

Manoj Neelapu has around nine years of experience in Java/J2EE/SOA technologies. He started his career as contractor engineer for Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (Helicopter Division) and later worked for BEA Systems as Developer Relations Engineer handling level3/4 support. Before joining Oracle, he had experience working with open-source technologies at Sudhari.

As a Principal Engineer in Oracle, Manoj has expertise in various components of Oracle Fusion Middleware stack, including Oracle Service Bus, Financial Service Bus, JCA Adapters, and Oracle WebLogic Integration. He currently works for SOA product lines as part of the engineering team. Among other activities, he actively participates on Oracle Technology Network evangelizing, trouble-shooting, and solving customer issues.

ShuXuan Nie is a software engineer specializing in SOA and Java technologies.

He has more than eight years of experience in the IT industry that includes SOA technologies such as BPEL, ESB, SOAP, XML, Enterprise Java technologies, Eclipse plugins, and other areas such as C++ cross-platform development.

Since 2007, he has been working as part of the Oracle Global Customer Support team and focuses on helping customers solve their Middleware/SOA integration problems.

Before joining Oracle, he worked for IBM China in their Software Development Lab for four years as a staff software engineer. She participated in several complex products involving IBM Lotus Workplace, Websphere, and the Eclipse platform before joining the Australia Bureau of Meteorology Research Center where she was responsible for the implementation of the Automated Thunderstorm Interactive Forecast System for Aviation and Defense.

He holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

When not reviewing SOA books ShuXuan enjoys swimming, dancing, and visiting new places.

Hajo Normann is SOA/BPM architect at HP Enterprise Services since 2005. He helps motivating, designing, and implementing integration solutions using Oracle SOA Suite and BPA Suite (a BPM-ready version of ARIS from IDS Scheer) and works on SOA/BPM principles, design guidelines, and best practices.

Since 2007, Hajo is the Oracle ACE Director. Since 2008, he leads together with Torsten Winterberg from OPITZ Consulting, the special interest group DOAG SIG SOA. Hajo is a co-founder of the Masons-of-SOA, an inter-company network, consisting of architects of Oracle Germany, Opitz Consulting, SOPERA, and HP ES - with the mission to spread SOA knowledge and support projects/initiatives across companies. The masons meet regularly for thought exchange, have written a multi-article series on Yet Unshackled SOA Topics, have contributed to Thomas Erl's book SOA Design Patterns and are giving whole day advanced SOA workshops on conferences.

Websites: http://hajonormann.wordpress.com/, http://soacommunity.com/

Preface

Service-Oriented Architecture is not just changing how we approach application integration, but the mindset of software development.

Applications as we know them are becoming a thing of the past, in the future we will increasingly think of services and how those services are assembled to build complete, composite applications that can be modified quickly and easily to adapt to a continually evolving business environment.

This is the vision of a standards-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), where the IT infrastructure is continuously adapted to keep up with the pace of business change.

Oracle is at the forefront of this vision, with the Oracle SOA Suite providing the most comprehensive, proven, and integrated tool kit for building SOA based applications.

This is no idle boast. Oracle Fusion Applications (the re-implementation of Oracle's E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards Enterprise as a single application) is probably the largest composite application being built today and it has the Oracle SOA platform at its core.

Developers and Architects using the Oracle SOA Suite, whether working on integration projects, building new bespoke applications or specializing in large implementations of Oracle Applications will need a book that provides a hands on guide on how best to harness and apply this technology, this book will enable them to do just that.

What this book covers

Part 1: Getting Started

This section provides an initial introduction to the Oracle SOA Suite and its various components, and gives the reader a fast paced hands-on introduction to each of the key components in turn.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite: Gives an initial introduction to the Oracle SOA Suite and its various components.

Chapter 2: Writing Your First Composite: Provides a hands-on introduction to writing your first SOA composite. We then look at how we can expose this as a proxy service via 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 Mediator to loosely couple services within a composite and Oracle Service Bus to loosely couple services within the Enterprise.

Chapter 5: Using BPEL to Build Composite Services and Business Processes: Covers how to use BPEL to assemble services to build composite services and long-running business processes.

Chapter 6: Adding in Human Workflow: 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: Covers the new Rules Editor in 11gR1, including Decision Tables and how we can incorporate rules as decision points within a BPEL Process.

Chapter 8: Using Business Events: Introduces the Event Delivery Network (EDN), a key new component in Oracle SOA Suite 11g that provides a declarative way to generate and consume business events within your SOA infrastructure.

Chapter 9: Building Real-time Dashboards: Looks at how Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can be used to give business users a real-time view into how business processes are performing.

Part 2: Putting it All Together

This section uses the example of an online auction site (oBay) to illustrate how to use the various components of the SOA Suite to implement a real-world SOA-based solution.

Chapter 10: oBay Introduction: Provides a blueprint for our SOA architecture, highlighting some of the key design considerations and describes how this fits into our architecture for oBay.

Chapter 11: Designing the Service Contract: Gives guidance on how to design XML schemas and service contracts for improved agility, reuse, and interoperability.

Chapter 12: Building Entity Services Using Service Data Objects (SDOs): Details how to use ADF-Business Components to implement Service Data Objects (SDOs) and embed them as Entity Variables within a BPEL Process.

Chapter 13: Building Validation into Services: Examines how we can implement validation within a service using XSD validation, Schematron, and Business Rules, as well as within the service.

Chapter 14: Error Handling: Examines strategies for handling system and business errors, with detailed coverage of the Composite Fault Management Framework.

Chapter 15: Advanced SOA Suite Architecture: Covers advanced SOA Architecture, including message delivery to asynchronous / synchronous composites, transaction handling, and clustering considerations.

Chapter 16: Message Interaction Patterns: Covers complex messaging interactions, including multiple requests and responses, timeouts, and message correlation (both system and business).

Chapter 17: Workflow Patterns: Looks at how to implement workflows involving complex chains of approval and how to use the Workflow Service API.

Chapter 18: Using Business Rules to Implement Services: Looks at the Rules Engine's inferencing capabilities, and how we can use them to implement types of business services.

Part 3: Other Considerations

This final section covers other considerations such as the packaging, deployment, testing, security, and administration of SOA applications.

Chapter 19: Packaging and Deployment: Examines how to package up SOA applications for deployment into environments such as test and production.

Chapter 20: Testing Composite Applications: Looks at how to create, deploy, and run test cases that automate the testing of composite applications.

Chapter 21: Defining Security and Management Policies: Details how to use policies to secure and administer SOA applications.

What you need for this book

Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.3) + Coherence + OEPE - Package Installer

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/htdocs/wls_main.html

          wls1033_oepe111150_win32.exe

Repository Creation Utility (11.1.1.3.0)

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/middleware/htdocs/

          fmw_11_download.htmlofm_rcu_win_11.1.1.3.0_disk1_1of1.zip

SOA Suite (11.1.1.2.0)

ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.2.0_disk1_1of1.zip

SOA Suite (11.1.1.3.0)

ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.3.0_disk1_1of1.zip

Oracle Service Bus (11.1.1.3.0)

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/osb/index.html.

          ofm_osb_generic_11.1.1.3.0_disk1_1of1.zip

Oracle JDeveloper 11g (11.1.1.3.0) Studio Edition

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/jdev/htdocs/soft11.html

          jdevstudio11113install.exe

XE Universal database version 10.2.0.1 or 10g database version 10.2.0.4+ or 11g database version 11.1.0.7+.

Enterprise Manager requires Firefox 3 or IE 7.

Firefox 3 - get it from http://portableapps.com if you want it to co-exist peacefully with your Firefox 2 installation (keep Firefox 2 if you use Rules Author in 10g R3.)

Firefox 2 and IE 6 do not work in 11g.

BAM requires IE 7

IE 7 without special plug-ins (some plug-ins may cause problems).

IE 8 does not work. IE 6 has a few UI issues. Firefox does not work.

Who this book is for

The primary purpose of the book is to provide developers and technical architects with a practical guide to using and applying the Oracle SOA Suite in the delivery of real world SOA-based applications.

It is assumed that the reader already has a basic understanding of the concepts of SOA, as well as some of the key standards in this space, including web services (SOAP, WSDL), XML Schemas, and XSLT (and XPath).

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: Each schema can reference definitions in other schema's by making use of the xsd:import directive.

A block of code will be set as follows:

  http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema>

    http://xmlns.oracle.com/Echo

            schemaLocation=Echo.xsd/>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

  http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema>

    http://xmlns.oracle.com/Echo             schemaLocation=Echo.xsd/>

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: The deployed test suites will appear in the EM console in the composite Unit Tests tab, as shown in the following screenshot.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book, what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply drop an email to <feedback@packtpub.com>, making sure to mention the book title in the subject of your message.

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If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Tip

Downloading the example code for this book

You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our contents, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in text or code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing this you can save other readers from frustration, and help to improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the Submit Errata link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata have been verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata added to the list of existing errata. The existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.

Piracy

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We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.

Questions

You can contact us at <questions@packtpub.com> if you are having a problem with some aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.

Part I. Getting Started

Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite

Writing Your First Composite

Service-enabling Existing Systems

Loosely-coupling Services

Using BPEL to Build Composite Services and Business Processes

Adding in Human Workflow

Using Business Rules to Define Decision Points

Using Business Events

Building Real-time Dashboards

Chapter 1. Introduction to Oracle SOA Suite

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) may consist of many interconnected components. As a result of this, the Oracle SOA Suite is a large piece of software that initially seems to be overwhelmingly complex. In this chapter, we will provide a roadmap for your understanding of the SOA Suite and provide a reference architecture to help you understand how to apply SOA principles with the SOA Suite. After a review of the basic principles of SOA, we will look at how the SOA Suite provides support for those principles through its many different components. Following this journey through the components of SOA Suite, we will introduce Oracle JDeveloper as the primary development tool that is used to build applications for deployment into the SOA Suite.

Service-oriented architecture in short

Service-oriented architecture has evolved to allow greater flexibility in adapting the IT infrastructure to satisfy the needs of business. Let's examine what SOA means by examining the components of its title.

Service

A service is a term that is understood by both business and IT. It has some key characteristics as follows:

Encapsulation: A service creates delineation between the service provider and the service consumer. It identifies what will be provided.

Interface: It is defined in terms of inputs and outputs. How the service is provided is not of concern to the consumer, only to the provider. The service is defined by its interface.

Contract or service level agreements: There may be quality of service attributes associated with the service, such as performance characteristics, availability constraints, or cost.

The break-out-box uses the example of a laundry service to make more concrete the characteristics of a service. Later, we will map these characteristics onto specific technologies.

Tip

A clean example

Consider a laundry service. The service provider is a laundry company, and the service consumer is a corporation or individual with washing to be done.

The input to the company is a basket of dirty laundry. Additional input parameters may be a request to iron the laundry as well as wash it or to starch the collars. The output is a basket of clean washing with whatever optional, additional services such as starching or ironing were specified. This defines the interface.

Quality of service may specify that the washing must be returned within 24 or 48 hours. Additional quality of service attributes may specify that the service is unavailable from 5PM Friday until 8AM Monday. These service level agreements may be characterized as policies to be applied to the service.

An important thing about services is that they can be understood by both business analysts and IT implementers. This leads to the first key benefit of service-oriented architecture.

Note

SOA makes it possible for IT and the business to speak the same language, that is, the language of services.

Services allow us to have a common vocabulary between IT and the business.

Orientation

When we are building our systems, we are looking at them from a service point of view or orientation. This implies that we are oriented or interested in the following:

Granularity: The level of service interface or number of interactions required with the service are typically characterized as course-grained or fine-grained.

Collaboration: Services may be combined together to create higher level or composite services.

Universality: All components can be approached from a service perspective. For example, a business process may also be considered a service that, despite its complexity, provides inputs and outputs.

Thinking of everything as a service leads us to another key benefit of service-oriented architecture, namely composability, which is the ability to compose a service out of other services.

Note

Composing new services out of existing services allows easy reasoning about the availability and performance characteristics of the composite service.

By building composite services out of existing services, we can reduce the amount of effort required to provide new functionality as well as being able to build something with prior knowledge of its availability and scalability characteristics. The latter can be derived from the availability and performance characteristics of the component services.

Architecture

Architecture implies a consistent and coherent design approach. This implies a need to understand the inter-relationships between components in the design and ensure consistency in approach. Architecture suggests that we adopt some of the following principles:

Consistency: The same challenges should be addressed in a uniform way. For example, the application of security constraints needs to be enforced in the same way across the design. Patterns or proven design approaches can assist with maintaining consistency of design.

Reliability: The structures created must be fit to purpose and meet the demands for which they are designed.

Extensibility: A design must provide a framework that can be expanded in ways both foreseen and unforeseen. See the break-out-box on extensions.

Scalability: The implementation must be capable of being scaled to accommodate increasing load by adding hardware to the solution.

Tip

Extending Antony's house

My wife and I designed our house in England. We built in the ability to convert the loft into extra rooms and also allowed for a conservatory to be added. This added to the cost of the build, but these were foreseen extensions. The costs of actually adding the conservatory and two extra loft rooms were low because the architecture allowed this. In a similar way, it is relatively easy to architect for foreseen extensions, such as additional related services and processes that must be supported by the business. When we wanted to add a playroom and another bathroom, this was more complex and costly as we had not allowed it in the original architecture. Fortunately, our original design was sufficiently flexible to allow for these additions, but the cost was higher. In a similar way, the measure of the strength of a service-oriented architecture is the way in which it copes with unforeseen demands, such as new types of business process and services that were not foreseen when the architecture was laid down. A well-architected solution will be able to accommodate unexpected extensions at a manageable cost.

A consistent architecture, when coupled with implementation in SOA Standards, gives us another key benefit, that is, inter-operability.

Note

SOA allows us to build more inter-operable systems as it is based on standards agreed by all the major technology vendors.

SOA is not about any specific technology. The principles of service orientation can be applied equally well using an assembler as they can in a high-level language. However, as with all development, it is easiest to use a model that is supported by tools and is both inter-operable and portable across vendors. SOA is widely associated with the web service or WS-* standards presided over by groups like OASIS (http://www.oasis.org). This use of common standards allows SOA to be inter-operable between vendor technology stacks.

Why SOA is different

A few years ago, distributed object technology, in the guise of CORBA and COM+, was going to provide benefits of reuse. Prior to that, third and fourth generation languages such as C++ and Smalltalk (based on object technology) were to provide the same benefit. Even earlier, the same claims were made for structured programming. So why is SOA different?

Terminology

The use of terms such as services and processes allows business and IT to talk about items in the same way, improving communication, and reducing impedance mismatch between the two. The importance of this is greater than what it appears at first because it drives IT to build and structure its systems around the business rather than vice