If you are not sure about what are these things and try to have a look at Oracle's website, there is a good chance that you might find yourself confused.
That's quite expected. Oracle's website is for marketing their product. It's not their interest to describe their products in a way that people think it is there is no magic about it!
So, here I try to explain the things in non-geeky terms.
The Fusion Middleware conisists of Oracle's non core-database products - some of which are not actually middleware!
This includes Oracle's Developer suite (Forms & Reports), Java related tools, web logic server, content management etc. OFM depends on open standards such as BPEL, SOAP, XML and JMS.
Oracle SOA is a part of OFM.
What is SOA?
The main essence of SOA is that applications will talk with each other in a language (i.e. data format, process steps) which is understood by all others applications communicating with.
SOA is about reuse.
SOA helps business to move, change, partner and re-invent itself with ease and grace.
SOA extends idea of reuse not only to web services but also with business services.
SOA components are loosely coupled.
SOA can contain web service, BPEL etc.
Web service
Example, you throw a postcode to Yahoo Geocoder and it gives you back latitude, longitude of that post code.
You ask for price of particular item to a website, it suplies you the price.
Usually, web service results are returned in XML format to ensure universal compatibility.
In SOA segment, you will often hear the term "Orchestration". What does it mean?
If you seen an orchestra, you know that conductor just draws some invisible drawings in mid air by moving his magic wand from one side to another. However, musicians can decipher his rhythm and plays their instruments so that every one plays same tune at same pace.
Orchestration in SOA has similar meaning. It ensures that all applications under SOA, know how to be in sync with other applications in the group.
But how orchestration is implemented?
It is done via BPEL or Business Process Execution Language.
BPEL is a tool, using which you can draw how data moves from one application to another. For those who have not used it, it is like a Visio flow chart diagram editor. But, when you draw objects in BPEL, you tell them what to do. You instruct them where to read data from, how to process it and where to send output after processing finished. So, basically it is a graphical tool to define business process. Without BPEL, the whole process will look like thousands of lines of PL/SQL (or Java or C++ or whatever) codes!
Behind the scene BPEL still writes codes - but it just make simpler (!) for any business user to understand and define the process. Now whether that is good or bad is debatable - I am just outlining the concept here.
So, BPEL works to integrate several applications. BPEL usually follows XML standard as interface to several components.
Let us take a bigger example. Your supplies sends you a file which contains all the products, quantities and unit price you ordered for. You need to update your inventory accordingly. Now assume that your supplier quoted the price in € but you need to put that in £ in your database. Using absolute minium technology, you need to write a small program to convert € to £ while loading that data to your system. But if you are using BPEL, you can visually draw the program!
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