The Foundation Pack provides a foundation for those wanting to start building their own custom integrations. There have been a number of challenges for organizations wanting to use SOA. These challenges according to InforWorld, include:
- 1. Lack of Architectural Blueprint
- 2. Inconsistent Business Semantics
- 3. Lack of standardized Business Service Definitions
- 4. Ensuring Compliance and Mitigating Risks
- 5. Doing More with Less
Introducing SOA into your IT environment can be a huge problem if there aren’t guidelines on how it should be done. That is what Oracle is trying to do by releasing the Foundation Pack.
The Foundation Pack provides answers to most of the challenges above. It includes:
- 1. A reference architecture that accelerates the move to SOA at a reduced cost/risk.
- 2. Design patterns
- 3. SOA Portfolio
- 4. SOA Governance
- 5. SOA Management Policies.
Bottomline, the Foundation Pack is great for jumpstarting custom SOA-based process integrations.
So.. what do you get with Foundation Pack? Here’s a nice Oracle graphic that helps.
First, you get a Reference Model to guide your development. This gives you the benefit of Oracle’s expertise in developing their own Process Integration Packs (PIP’s).
Second, you get a set of Enterprise Business Objects (EBO). The EBO’s include object definitions for customers, suppliers, inventory items, invoices, purchase orders, etc… These EBO’s included a set of data elements that Oracle has derived by examining best-of breed applications, both their own and even SAP.
Third, you get a set of Enterprise Business Services (EBS) to handle integrations.
Fourth, you get a set of Enterprise Business Messages (EBM) already defined.
Fifth, you get standard interaction patterns for managing synchronous and asynchronous message handling between Services.
Sixth, you get an Error Handling and Logging framework for your integrations.
Seventh, you get the initial version of the Composite Application Validation System (CAVS) which provides automated unit-testing capability for objects, messages and Services.
Eighth, you get a Diagnostics Framework.
Ninth, you get a Business Service Repository tool.
Tenth, you get a nice installer package to set it up with.
Additional value that Oracle has added is the ability to manage versioning and a standard way to add customizations so that future upgrades/release don’t impact existing implementations.
They also provide documentation and guidelines based on their experiences which are very helpful.
To summarize, the Foundation Pack includes the basic tools to build integrations using the Fusion Middleware SOA Suite and provides the guidelines for doing it right.
