Inside Oracle 45
By Graham Keitch
Graham Keitch takes an inside look at Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.
HardCopy Issue: 45 | Found In: Database | Published: 01/09/2009 | Last Revision: 07/07/2010
The latest release of Oracle Fusion Middleware, namely 11g, was unveiled in London on 1 July this year, so now is a good time to highlight some of its features and innovations. Oracle’s middleware components include a variety of hot pluggable, standards-based J2EE applications and tools that have been designed to integrate with a broad range of both Oracle and third-party technologies. As we shall discover, they fall into a number of broad categories.
Enterprise application server
For some time, Oracle has focused on becoming the provider of the most advanced suite of middleware products available and their offering has been designed to be both complete and best of breed. To achieve this, Oracle has recently acquired a number of leading solutions, the most notable being BEA Systems.
The new release has enabled Oracle to bring the best from these products together. Oracle’s flagship application server is Oracle WebLogic Server, which came from BEA. This 11g release adds new levels of operational insight and automation for high availability with reduced administrative overheads. WebLogic Enterprise Edition now supports grid computing by way of GridLink for Oracle Real Application Clusters and Enterprise Grid Messaging. WebLogic Server and other related tools are packaged together in the newly released WebLogic Suite.
Service Orientated Architecture
The products covering system integration are grouped into three main areas: SOA, process management and governance. The SOA and Business Process Manager (BPM) Suites contain an overlapping collection of tools. Components unique to the SOA bundle include Oracle Service Bus, Web Services Manager, B2B and a Complex Event Processing solution for intense transaction environments.
Fusion and the ISV community
Oracle Fusion Middleware provides the building blocks that enable developers and ISVs to construct enterprise-class systems, building on existing installations of Oracle Database. Grey Matters runs the ISV Resource Centre portal for Oracle which contains information for those working with Oracle technologies.
Turning to the BPM Suite, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is used for process management and BPEL Process Manager handles process orchestration and execution. With 11g, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is now fully Java-based, Human Workflow is more extensible and Business Rules has been given an improved interface.
The Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) handles data capture, transformation and synchronisation, and provides other services for moving data around the middle-tier. There are adapters for a wide range of Oracle technologies and other platforms such as SAP. There is a Fusion suite for governance which includes a metadata Enterprise Repository for visibility, control and analysis of SOA assets.
In common with other vendors, Oracle is taking an event-driven (ED) view of SOA and another suite is packaged for complex ED architectures. It includes a new release of Coherence which now supports dynamic partitioning of data across large clusters. Coherence automatically fails over and redistributes its clustered data management services when necessary.
Development
The Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is a J2EE framework that provides infrastructure services together with a visual and declarative development environment. Developer Suite contains JDeveloper, Forms and BI Beans. It also includes TopLink which is an object to relational mapping tool that handles persistency issues. The latest release of TopLink provides tighter integration with WebLogic and Coherence.
JDeveloper is a free integrated development environment that simplifies the creation of Java SOA applications and user interfaces. It supports the whole development life cycle. MetaData Service (MDS) is a common metadata architecture that underlies both JDeveloper and BPM to improve access, drill-down and navigation. Metadata is strategic to this release and will continue to be in future releases going forward.
Business intelligence
Oracle Fusion Middleware contains a number of tools that deal with BI and enterprise performance, although some are standalone applications rather than component elements of mid-tier ‘plumbing’. Acquisitions have helped equip Oracle with some of the best solutions in the industry. The Hyperion products cover enterprise performance and planning while Oracle Business Intelligence and associated products such as BI Publisher, Reports Services and Crystal Ball meet the reporting, analytical and forecasting needs of end-users.
There are also solutions for Microsoft interoperability. Fusion supports the use of Office as a front-end for enterprise applications, allowing data to be read, parsed and generated in documents formatted using Office. Beehive provides an integrated set of collaboration services and is also part of the Fusion stack, as is the newly launched WebCenter Suite. This provides a broad set of reusable components that can be plugged into virtually any type of portal to enhance social networking and personal productivity. Finally, Oracle Composer is a browser-based tool that both end-users and developers can use to create applications, portals and social sites.