# 223 SOA Made Simple Chapters 7-10

This is the last leg of this book review. It is the sort of book that I can imagine one ends up delving into off and on - i.e. excellent reference work.

Chapter 7 is titled - Creating a Roadmap - How to spend your money and when?
Here they forgot to add with whom --)

This harks back to the original SOA goal of bridging the business / IT gap. The authors chasten us in to remembering that SOA - "can result in additional technical complexity and organizational challenges". Ok, so they are preaching to the converted - just remember that this has to be explained in the context of the overall value-add of the business case. The chapter contains many scenarios that succinctly illustrate this.

The Roadmap describes the long term plan/goals along with the short term plan/goals that progress us on the way. They mention various forms of work packages -e.g. service by service, process by process, feature by feature etc. As we progress along the way we also become more SOA mature. The authors discuss this and posit 5 stages from Starting with SOA to Maintenance.  Again very useful concepts to leverage in your customer discussions.

Chapter 8 - Lifecycle Management.
...from service identification to service retirement. 
excellent stuff here - the chapter discusses -

- versioning of services
- types of change (contract, interface, implementation) and their implication.
The section on tooling mentions registries / repositories. For more info on Oracle's offering in this space, please see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/repository/overview/index.html


Chapter 9 is titled - Pick your Battles

This covers essentially the area of governance from a variety of perspectives -
- architectural
- development
- ops
- change management

The title is somewhat of a misnomer - because if you follow the authors' suggestions here you probably
will end up pacifying everyone.

Chapter 10 - Methodologies and SOA

There are many methodologies out there from Togaf to Prince, BiSL, ASL etc.
In this chapter, the authors discuss how SOA fits into all of this. It may help you pick up your customer from they are at and show them how easily SOA can fit into their world. Very important for the organizational change aspect of SOA.

That's it - an excellent book - well worth the €.


  

# 222 Oracle Fusion CRM - Querying Customer via Web Services

Here I want to query SalesParty based on
- PartyName
- website
- City
- Country
- Phone Number

it leverages the findSalesParty operation -->
you can, of course, modify to suit your needs.

SOAP Request here

# 221 Oracle Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum XVI

I attended the above last week in Faro, Portugal. Great event, as usual with Juergen Kress as the master of cermonies. I am always impressed by his organizational skills as well as his dedication and out and out professionalism. Juergen - take a bow!

I ran the 2 day BPM 11g PS6 workshop along with my colleagues David Read and Angelo Santagata.
The feedback from the partners was great - very positive. So I am looking forward to blogging about all the cool new functionality/features which are about to be unleashed.

So watch this space...

#220 Fusion CRM - create a SALES_PROSPECT via web services

Thanks to DonS.

Step 1. create a new address for the prospect using the Location Service.

Use the LocationId returned in the next step. This will be used for the PartySite.

e.g.

 

Step 2. Use the SalesPartyService --> createSalesParty

     

view in Oracle Fusion CRM -

#219 SOA Made Simple 4-6

Continuing my review -

Chapter 4 - Classification of services -

In this chapter the authors go into more detail on Elementary services, Composire Services and Process services and their relationship to the 3 architecture layers - Business, Information and Technology.This chapter also discusses aggregation vs orchestration - and contains many real world examples to illustrate all concepts discussed.

Chapter 5 - The SOA Platform

This chapter discusses the building blocks of a SOA platform - Registry/Repository, ESB, Identity Management, BPM etc.
Please see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/overview/index.html
for a description of the Oracle platform.

This is an excellent chapter and prepares one well for looking at implementation and maybe Antony Reynold's book  - Oracle SOA Suite 11g Developer's Cookbook

Chapter 6 - Solution Architectures 

This chapter looks at some of the SOA platforms available - Oracle, IBM, MSFT.
Guess which one comes out on top?

Again the link -

SOA made simple

 

#218 SOA 11G Database Growth Management Strategy

Please see this very useful whitepaper
www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/availability/soa11gstrategy-1508335.pdf

#217 OATS 12c -Application Testing made easy

worth looking at for not just SOA/BPM app testing -

Check it out here