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Oracle SOA Foundation - methodology
"It's like if you want to buy a car. Would you get an engine from BMW, a chassis from Jaguar, windshield wipers from Ford? No, of course
not. Right now with the software that's out there, you need a glue gun—or hire all these consultants to put it together. They call it best of
breed. I call it a mess. We want to put an end to that."
--Larry Ellison
This emotional but hesitation-free statement made in the year 2000 pointed out the Oracle
CEO's core procedural beliefs for the next few years as follows:
• Packaging the best-of-breed components without standardization is a dead end.
You will run out of glue. The sole term
best-of-breed
without any criterion (read:
principles) describes why it's actually the best and is clarity of meaning.
• Components standardization is impossible without rewriting the components in or-
der to make it compliant with the SOA principles specifically responsible for the
service/component design (such as autonomy, statefulness, abstraction, and reusab-
ility). However, this is bad news for those who believe that OSB and BPEL alone
will solve everything.
Oracle had to establish a solid methodology in order to plug various Fusion applications to-
gether and give customers an option regarding what to choose from for their primary busi-
ness components. The regular choice would be the ERP Oracle products from the Fusion
application portfolio. But methodology, based on SOA principles, would be suitable to es-
tablish the collaboration between different products as long as their architecture is based on
the same principles. In other words, you do not need to purchase OEBS, Siebel,
PeopleSoft, and so on in order to follow the methodology proposed by Oracle. Most im-
portantly, you do not need to buy methodology-related frameworks to practice it if you do
not have a single Fusion application in your portfolio. This architectural approach, called
Application Integration Architecture
(
AIA
), is a perfect example of how to employ SOA
principles and patterns grouped in clearly defined frameworks to work toward the integra-
tion of disparate applications.
Wait a minute, you might say. Earlier, we stated that SOA contrasts integration, and integ-
ration is the beast we would like to get rid of. Is there some kind of contradiction here? Not
really. Firstly, most Fusion applications (and not only Fusion) emerged and were acquired
well before the realization of the SOA approaches. All these approaches are evolutionary,
so the transition from classical integration to SOA pluggability was gradual and the applic-
ations have been rewritten many times.
SOA Big Bang
is the last thing we need in our
business, and thus traditional integration still has its share in this framework.
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