OOW 2009: Oracle SOA Suite 11g architecture

Oracle Open World 2009 has opened its doors last Sunday. Yesterday, we saw a great session on architecture of Oracle SOA Suite 11g done by Greg Pavlik and Clemens Utschig-Utschig. Most important takeways are listed here:

-Events get first class citizens in SOA Suite 11g SCA composites. That’s a great abstraction from underlying messaging systems delivering great productivity to the developers. You even can react on events within BPEL processes! Not standard, but highly appreciated feature! Make yourself familiar with the Event Delivery Network (EDN) features.

-SCA: currently, the assembly model of SCA is realized in SOA Suite 11g. A SCA composite can contain BPEL processes, mediator, rules, workflow and events. In the next patch set we will likely see an enhancement to this, going to component model of SCA: We will be able to leverage pure Java code as implementation of a component. This is done by providing the ability to use a Spring context inside a composite, leveraging the features of Spring beans directly without doing outbound service calls. That’s great to see. Rumors even say, that there is work going on to leverage the C language to be used inside a composite, e.g. to integrate directly with Tuxedo.

-Deployment: Is done via ant. Now you have deployment configs allowing to do the staging from dev to test to prod. These configurations are applied during deployment process and best: you have a report saying in detail how the destinations will get configured.