New Oracle SOA Book

Are you new to SOA and would like to learn how Oracle SOA Suite fits into the SOA world ? Or are you a SOA professional and looking for an all in one book on Oracle SOA Suite? Then wait no more, after a few months of waiting, Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds finished the Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide book and now available in the market.

I was assigned to research on how to integrate Oracle Retail application and our client’s legacy system. I have done some research and found some online tutorials in Oracle website but I found most of them are using the BPEL Designer plugin of Eclipse. I have no luck of finding this plugin so I installed JDeveloper to create simple BPEL modules. Good thing Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide book came in to save my time finding the equivalent steps in the tutorial to JDeveloper because thoughout the book, the examples are using JDeveloper.

I’m familiar to basic SOA concepts because I have been reading IBM’s SOA Redbook in the past. With my limited time to read the whole book, I jumped reading Chapter 3: Service-enabling existing systems which covers integration of new and legacy system. As most system designers and architects know, to integrate a legacy system to the another application, the integration modules are usually reading files to transfer data from one system to another.

Chapter 3 covers File Adapter for reading local files, FTP adapter for remotes files and DB Adapter which is use to data manipulation in the database. The steps are easy to follow and you will not get lost because there are screenshots provided to guide you.

For full details of the book, please visit the official book page in PackPub website.

Things to Do

1. Tutorials on the following:
   1. SQL
   2. PL/SQL
   3. Oracle Forms
   4. Unix
   5. C
   6. Java
   7. J2EE
   8. SOA
   9. Oracle SOA Suites
2. Create a personal blog.
3. Update SOA Enterprise
4. Review for PL/SQL exam
5. Review for Oracle Forms Exam
6. Study IBM SOA
7. Study UML and Object Oriented Design
8. Study SCEA
9. Study Oracle SOA

Becoming a Technical Architect

After my long vacation, doing something different from my work as an Oracle Retail specialist, I realized that I have a brand new dream. In the past, I’m eager to accelerate my career level progression. I want to move up to a higher position as soon as possible but due to the undesired and unexpected turns of time, this is not a feasible as before.

I’m goal now is to further improve my technical skills and be certified. I started to review for Oracle Certification. I reviewed for 3 months for my examination in 1Z0-007 Introduction to SQL and passed with 90.4%. Now I’m now preparing for Oracle Database SQL Expert Exam which is scheduled on Sept 13, 2007. This is a beta exam which I need to wait for 10 weeks to know the results. After this I’ll prepare for PL/SQL exam.

Right now I’m thinking to proceed with certification as an Architect by taking examinations for Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA). I’m a member of PinoyJUG(Pinoy Java Users Group) and a couple of members are interested taking this specially Sun is offering free examination for this beta examination.

The following are useful links for this certification.

• SCEA Preparation
• Recommended Books and Tools
• Javaranch SCEA Discussion Forum