The 12c version of the SOA Suite has finally been released. And seen from a developer perspective there are a lot of notable news. I will summarize the ones I've discovered so far but I'm sure there are a lot more packed under the hood that I haven't discovered yet.
Installer
Of course the major new feature from a developer perspective is the new installation procedure. I tried the installer in a Virtual Environment (VirtualBox) on CentOS and everything was installed very easily using the provided quickstart installer. I will try to write a post about the installation process on a later date.
New Features
There are a lot of new features in Oracle SOA Suite 12c. The most notable of those are:
- Coherence Adapter
- You can now easily cache data across the entire platform.
- MSMQ Adapter
- Something many have been missing in the past. You can now connect to a Microsoft MSMQ directly. This can be very useful when doing integrations with Microsoft based technologies.
- Cloud Adapter
- This is the first rendition of the Oracle Cloud Adapter and it initially supports Salesforce.com and from the documentation it will "soon" support a suite of the Oracle Cloud products. However the really interesting part of this adapter is the availability of a Cloud Adapter SDK so you can develop your own Cloud Adapter integrations. This could prove very useful and will hopefully allow third party cloud services to enable integrations with Oracle SOA Suite using the Cloud Adapter.
- Oracle Service Bus integration
- The Oracle Service Bus has now been more tightly integrated with the SOA Suite. Development on the Service Bus has now, finally, been integrated with JDeveloper allowing a developer to have a onestop IDE.
- Templates
- It seems that a lot of effort has gone into making template support a lot more useful. You can now create templates for a wide range of things. This will allow to have a more generic way of solving common problems in the code.
JDeveloper News
JDeveloper has seen a major overhaul for the 12c release. As written above, Service Bus development has been integrated and there are a lot of other new features which can help in the development. I will list the most notable below.
- Maven support
- This is really cool, and something that has been missing for a long time. There is now builtin maven support. This will make integration with Agile development a lot simpler and make it easy to use Hudson/Jenkins and similar products more useful in the development process.
- Graphical XQuery editor
- Something I know a lot of developers have been asking about. It seems that doing XQuery in your process have now become easier with the new editor. I haven't tried this yet, but it should prove useful
- Debugging
- Debugging your components have also become a lot easier. It is now possible to set beakpoints in your composite which will definetely make it easier to figure out what is going on, on a particular section of your code.
- Testing
- Testing has been enhanced which will make unit testing much more useful. This is something that have really been missing in previous releases.
- Fault Handling
- Doing fault handling in 11g was quite cumbersome and you had to write XML files by hand. This has now been made easier with a proper Fault Handling editor in 12c.