A new alliance between SOA Software (formerly Digital Evolution) and Oracle presents a unique opportunity to BPEL developers, according to an Oracle executive and an Oracle users group leader. SOA Software, based in Santa Monica, CA, recently announced the certification of its Service Manager with Oracle BPEL Process Manager and related products.

The move is designed to provide Oracle customers with the benefits of an SOA by abstracting all the complexity of consuming Web services away from process tools while making it easier to implement end-to-end security, location transparency and SLAs. (SOA Software is also a Certified Advantage Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork.)

 "The combination of using SOA Software Service Manager with BPEL Process Manager will allow our joint customers to easily move to SOA and Web services" said Amlan Debnath, vice president, Server Technologies, Oracle.

Basheer Khan, vice president, SOA Software and current chairman of the international Oracle Web Services Special Interest Group (wssig.oaug.org), supports this view, noting, "In addition, users will benefit from location transparency, protocol transformation, load-balancing and enforcement of SLAs as they build a very cost-effective, highly-scalable SOA fabric using BPEL to address their enterprise integration needs."

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is becoming a popular method of assembling a set of disparate services into a complete process flow, radically reducing the cost and complexity of process integration initiatives. In an exclusive interview with SYS-CON, Debnath and Khan outlined the implications of the SOA Software-Oracle announcement.

                 
Amlan Debnath                      Basheer Khan

“Oracle is a leading player in the J2EE area of the application platform suite and has designed Oracle BPEL Process Manager to run on top of Oracle Application Server as well as competing offering in the market.” Debnath noted in an exclusive interview wih SYS-CON.

“For these SOA and Web services based applications you need a design-time environment and monitoring management framework,’ he said. “You need a new platform to build these modern applications…it often includes a rich portal or DHTML-based front end and the J2EE-driven applications sitting on the application server. Oracle has a unified design and monitoring environment for accomplishing this task and a grid-enabled scalable application server platform.”

But, he continued, “(The trick is) that most customers are connected to legacy systems: mainframes, .NET environments, apps written in COBOL or C, etc. All of these things have data, and they have logic embedded in them. The challenge is, how do you treat them as service providers and use them to build your higher-level applications? Turnin them into Web services is the way.”

“The additional thing that is required is something to make them managed web services rather than raw web services….now, with BPEL, web services management is coming from the SOA Service Manager product you can do that.”

Khan noted, “In the past, people used to painfully hardcode these applications together. But with BPEL Process Manager, which uses the industry-standard Businesss-Process Execution Language, they can now communicate using XML-based Web services and extract all the business logic, keeping it application as well as pplatform agnostic. The SOA Software Service Manage sits alongside it nicely.”

Khan added that the announcement is geared toward Oracle users starting to use Web services, per se: “How do manage and monitor these Web services, how do you secure them, and how do you put policies around them?”  But it’s also critical that application developers are cognizant of the functionality of the SOA Service Manager when they are designing these services. “The impact (of the announcement) applies to those who are building Web services as well as in using them,” he noted.

When you want applications to talk to one another using Web services, the SOA Service Manager sits between them, establishing Policy Implementation as well as Enforcement points for authentication and enforcement of security policies. So it’s good for developers to be aware of this functionality from the beginning and it could lead to reduced coding.”

The executives outlined three types of application targeted by the announcement, in which developers and managers are working with combinations of automated processing between multiple services. DSL provisioning is one example. A variant of this would be where human workflow—to check a customer credit history, for example—intervened into the automated process. A third type of application would be where a customer is building visualization on top of services, such as an analytics process in which data was being collected from multiple systems, collated, and presented to users.

The bottom-line, according to Debnath, “is that solutions are similar at some level. You have to have managed web services and orchestration. Oracle has a very competitive app server, performance, scalability, robustness, etc. And now we have added this valuable BPEL process manager.”