SOA, Web Services & BPEL - Tech Forum in Singapore

Recently, i gave a talk and BPEL demo to singapore partners for Oracle BPEL & SOA suites. Introducing them idea of SOA, BPEL and Web Services and how to make use of oracle technology in their applications.

SOA stands for service oriented architecture, it is a architecture model.

Talk about architecture, we need to understand basic building block of each application and system.

Like we build a real house, we use mortar and brick. Every application / system was built with business logic and process. Business process weaves all business logics into one application to achieve business goals. Process and logic weave seamlessly and hard coded into a monolithic application. Like we cook soup, we put all ingredients into water and hard for us to separate each out in the end, by which it reduce reusability of standard process and logics.

In traditional application, when people wanna change the process or integrated with other application / system, especially it is a heterogeneous platform or technology integration, that will be very hard and time-consuming.

For SOA applications, applications also build with process and so-called business logic (have been wrapped into self-contained services). Process and services are loosely coupled, people can easily add or remove services from process, not like traditional applications (process & logic fuse into one). Other than that, people can easily design & program the business process with a advanced IDE. Overall experience for process design and implementation will be a drag-and-drop exercise.

SOA process should be standard, easily extensible and composable. When build an SOA application, we start from building a portfolio of services , follow with well-defined business process to orchestrate services to achieve business goal. This is where BPEL comes in for business process implementation and web service for business service implementation.

Many people equate web services with Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), but web services are just one element of SOA - they're about service invocation. SOA's scope is broader than just invocation. It's a complete software component architectural model, a way to organize, manage, deploy, discover, and expose software components, and to consume these over the Internet. From the software life-cycle perspective, in addition to the typical software development phases of design, development, and deployment, SOA defines web services-specific phases that include service publishing, discovery, binding and consumption, and management.

Note, SOA != web service+bpel