Oracle SOA Suite Developer Preview (10.1.3.1.0) available for download

I just learned that the Oracle SOA Suite is available for download at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/soapreview.html This download – a mere 560 Mb- provides us with a preview of number of key components for building a true Service Oriented Architecture built on the Oracle Fusion Middleware Technology. The main components in this suite:

• Integrated Service Environment (ISE) to develop services (JDeveloper)
• Oracle BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate services into business processes
• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to connect existing IT systems and business partners as a set of services
• Oracle Business Rules for dynamic decisions at runtime that can be managed by business users or business analysts
• Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to monitor services and disparate events and provide real-time visibility into the state of the enterprise, business processes, people, and systems.
• Oracle Web Services Manager to secure and manage authentication, authorization, and encryption policies on services that is separate from your service logic
• UDDI registry to discover and manage the lifecyle of Web services.
• Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 (10.1.3.1.0) to provide a complete Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4-compliant environment for your J2EE applications.

We have discussed the SOA Suite and most of the constituent components on our weblog over the past year. In May we attended and reported on the ESB Beta Workshop in The Netherlands and predicted that late August would see the first preview release of the SOA Suite. I did not really believe it myself back then – but Oracle proved true to its word this time. Before too long you can see more articles on our weblog on the SOA Suite, as we are deep into SOA, BPEL and getting started on the ESB as well.

The Quick Start Guide explains the highlights for the SOA Suite preview, the installation and the Demo Application accompanying it.

One thing that strikes me is that the SOA Suite does not install into Oracle Lite – as Oracle BPEL PM used to do and the ESB Beta we saw in May did as well – but requires a true Oracle RDBMS (XE, SE, EE) instead.

We also need Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3.1.0 Studio edition. Note: this is just the same JDeveloper we use for J2EE development, there is nothing SOA specific about it. Until we install the SOA Suite plug-ins for JDeveloper. But we can use the same JDeveloper installation for all JDeveloper and SOA Suite development activitities – which is of course much more convenient.

Things I always tend to forget and cannot find: This quick start assumes the following:

• The AS Instance Name is soademo.
• The AS Administrator Password is welcome1.
• The default port is 8888.