An Introduction to Oracle Fusion – a Solid Foundation for Service Inventory - Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform - page 117

Oracle SOA foundation - runtime backbone
The AIA methodology is a fusion of principles and patterns implemented on Oracle's tech-
nology stack, which is in its turn is a fusion of message-oriented middleware, database, ap-
plication servers, security tools, governance suites, developers workbenches, and lan-
guages, which has matured over the years. Each of them presents its own universe, de-
served to be explored in many separate topics (and it is). We are not aiming to give you any
guidance on them as it's simply impossible within the scope of this topic, although links to
the most recent documentation for each component will be provided in the related section.
Our goal is to demonstrate how certain tools can contribute to solving particular problems
of service orientation and what strengths of these tools we should employ during patterns
implementation.
We will not only focus on SOA Suite and the OSB components of OFM as they can hardly
solve all the common SOA implementation problems alone, but we will also start from the
foundation.
The Oracle database
In addition to the database being Oracle's roots and glory, there is nothing that cannot be
implemented in the Entity service model by means of the Oracle DB (presently, 11 gR2 and
we see that 12 c has arrived). This is not an exaggeration. Literally, what you can do with
Java or C#, you can do with modern PL/SQL. It won't be an exaggeration to state that some
utility and task-orchestrated services can be (and probably must be) implemented by a sole
Oracle DB. Among many other modern (and not that modern) DB features, the following
items help to make this possible:
• Native XML support
• Native object-orientation with Java support
• Multitude of message delivery methods (protocols and MEPs)
Firstly, it's possible because of the full XML support along with the object-orientation sup-
port. The XML functionality is presented by the XDB features, available since 2002.
Oracle DB has its own JVM with J2EE support, making it a fully capable application serv-
er with complete XDK support. Practically all W3C standards are supported with the core
J2EE patterns, such as Front Controller (Servlet). The configuration of Oracle XML DB is
defined and stored in an Oracle XML DB Repository resource, /xdbconfig.xml , and