Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM, also known as Fusion Middleware) consists

of several software products from Oracle Corporation. OFM spans

multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services,
business intelligence, and business process management, as shown
in Figure 8.2. OFM depends on open standards such as BPEL (Business
Process Execution Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol),
XML (Extensible Markup Language), and JMS (Java Message Service).
OFM provides software for the development, deployment, and management
of service-oriented architecture (SOA). It includes what Oracle calls
hot-pluggable architecture, designed to facilitate integration with existing
applications and systems from other software vendors such as IBM,
Microsoft, and SAP AG.
Some of these products have been discussed in previous chapters, so you
will hopefully get the sense of Oracle s overlapping product lines. Table 8.1
provides more descriptive details on each of the Oracle Fusion components.
Most notable is the emphasis on SOA. Oracle SOA Suite enables system
developers to set up and manage services and to orchestrate them into
composite applications and business processes. With Oracle SOA Suite s
hot-pluggable components, organizations can easily extend and evolve
their architectures instead of replacing existing investments.
Services are unassociated, loosely coupled units of functionality that are
self-contained. Each service implements one action, such as submitting
an online application for an account, retrieving an online bank statement,
or modifying an online booking or airline ticket order. Within a SOA,
services use defined protocols that describe how services pass and parse
messages using description metadata.
Underlying and enabling all of this requires metadata in sufficient detail
to describe not only the characteristics of these services, but also the data
that drives them.