SOA

The seminar yesterday focused on SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. Teacher Michel Hascoët gave us an impressive demo with his notebook and JDeveloper; the SOA Workshop is usually taking four days, and for us he did it in one day.

Ok, first ADF. With JDeveloper, he created with just a few clicks a connection to a database, dropped two screens, one for browsing customers, one for editing a customer, and just by clicking "run", the application started in a browser.

Later, we saw the BPEL process manager in JDeveloper. I have been quite impressed. Well, I am a vi man after all, and I am typically quite sceptical about click-click-click and it works. What is really sexy in the BPEL approach is that the application is built in a natural way. You just define process, like you would do "if (y==2)", or "x=1" in vi, but in a good-looking fashion. At the end, the application is self-documented, and this is a real bonus, because the next developer in task for your project will understand your work immediatly.

As Michel pointed out, the key point to success is the data format. If you can exchange Data from one application to another, than building a new process is just a matter of a few clicks.

In the afternoon, we had a look at BAM, the Oracle Business Activity Monitor. This Windows tool (needs a windows server and an internet explorer client) let you build graphs and send alerts according to rules and sensors you can define in JDeveloper. Michel believes this tool will be rewritten by Oracle in a near future to comply with the OS strategy of Oracle, understand Java.

At the end of the day, we have been watching a OWSM demo. Oracle Web Service Manager is a security product for your application. Instead of connecting to your OC4J component directly (with http), you actually access a Proxy server, where you can eventually add authentication with a directory server like OID and authorization, than access the OC4J url, which can be behind a firewall.

Learn more : http://otn.oracle.com/soa