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Oracle has been taking a very active role in development and putting these standards into
practice as a member of W3C since August 1995. Oracle has been a sponsor of the OASIS
Web Services' technical committees since 2002 (and members of the board of directors
since 2003). Oracle participated in practically all technical committees for all core SOA
standards such as WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing, WS-BPEL, and so on. The
previous timeline shows a strong correlation of product releases with standards acceptance
and approval. Today, about 200 open standards and industry specifications are adopted in
Oracle's SOA-related products. Surely, for such a huge company with such a comprehens-
ive portfolio, changes and adaptations weren't as fast as some would expect with open
source products (from the Apache community). In addition (and this would be the primary
reason), the clients' reception of Oracle's initiatives was sometimes inadequate due to the
products' roles and SOA principles being misunderstanding in general.
Probably one of the most noticeable examples would be the launch of the first release of
Oracle BPEL Manager (originally from Collaxa). The Service Orchestration Engine,
primarily nominated for its asynchronous services, was mistaken by many as the syn-
chronous Service Bus. How many complaints about its synchronous MEPs performance
did we witness (and produce, to be honest) at the time? All the complaints were because
the Orchestration pattern was not clearly distinguished from the ESB pattern in various
implementations. Public demand for a clear service collaboration strategy was quite no-
ticeable, and after several years of initially combined SOA and integration efforts, Oracle
responded with Fusion Strategy Roadmap (2006), where Fusion Middleware was declared
as an SOA Enabler. In this sense, the term Fusion indicates a balanced approach, where
the main focus is on SOA interoperability between components with the elements of in-
tegration, where service orientation is not feasible or too burdensome. Oracle SOA Suite
10 g as a part of Fusion Middleware was introduced as a milestone of the Fusion roadmap
including the following products:
• Oracle Service Bus, the first full-fledged Oracle ESB after InterConnect
• Oracle BPEL Manager with an extremely extensive Adapter framework
• Oracle Web Service Manager, with agents and gateways for secure policy-based
message interchange
• Oracle Rule Engine, which supports various types of rules with rule SDK
The previously listed products are just a few of those available in the Fusion bundle.
Oracle had much more to offer, and in general, these products met expectations from SOA
architects and developers. The Fusion strategy started to pay off. The next steps according
to the Fusion strategy were as follows:
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