As I’m sure you can tell, I’m very WebSphere focused. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the zillion WebSphere branded products that get released throughout the year. On my random surfing of the internet (tyvm Technorati) , I turned up Oracle’s entry into the world of SOA: Oracle SOA Suite 11g.

The interesting bit about this product is that it runs in direct competition with WebSphere Integration Developer. It uses the SCA runtime (I assume it’s Apache Tuscany), supports BPEL, Business Rules and even AJAX based Human Task forms. Pretty much the key features that WebSphere Integration Developer lists.

I don’t really know much about the product other than the marketing information found on the oracle site, but I’m all for competition in the marketplace.

The Oracle Assembly diagram:

Pretty much what I would expect to see. Exports on one side, business components in the middle and Imports on the other side. I wonder if Oracle resolved the weirdness in terminology of the “Export” starting your process while the “Import” calls other processes. Most people get confused with that right off the bat.

I also have to laugh at Oracles name for the WPS Failed Event Manager: “Error Hospital”. It’s in quotes in the presentation, so it’s likely it’ll get marketized into something better (and non-infringing on IBM’s FEM).

Oracle also has a “Large Document Handler” which is interesting. Today, most app servers are pretty bad at handling lage industry standard schema’s so it’s good to see Oracle address this up-front rather than trying to tack it on later.

Of course, everything always works without issue in PowerPoint so I’m interested to see how it works in the real world.