Notes from SOA Workshop

On February 1 we attended a one day SOA workshop at Oracle's office in Columbia. What follows are my half thoughts from the workshop.

What SOA does: brings together disconnected applications; all about enterprise integration and exposing systems and resources. SOA is non-proprietary. And it requires a different approach (top-down) to development -- start with "what is my business trying to do?" and not "what do my systems do?".

Old

• functionality driven
• long term design
• data oriented

SOA

• process oriented
• designed for change
• business service oriented

MICA Connected needs SOA (bring together ID cards, R25, Diebold, Blackboard, bulk load of data like applicants)!

WSDL = web services definition language
BPEL = XML document
JDeveloper = middleware development tool

The steps involved in developing with SOA:

1. Create BPEL process (type, schema, etc. define structure, inputs and outputs)
2. Graphically (or manually) design process
3. Get PeopleSoft WSDL
4. Create partner link (the service that you want to communicate with)
5. Assignments (populate variables)

For PeopleSoft integration we must have a PS component interface for anything that we want to expose from PS. There are currently 1500 delivered EIP's (enterprise integration points).

Note: SOA can only deploy to Oracle Application Server.

For my offline take on developing with SOA visit my Educause blog.