Oracle Application Server Portal Handbook

Service-Oriented Architecture

It’s almost impossible to pick up a computer magazine or development book that doesn’t have some reference to service-oriented architecture. SOA means a lot of different things to different people (type define:SOA on Google), but for our purposes, we are concerned with Oracle’s vision of SOA and, more specifically, Oracle’s vision of how OracleAS Portal makes SOA accessible for developers and end users.

Portals were born from the simple desire to provide a one-stop destination for information in an enterprise. That information could come from production databases, data warehouses, legacy applications, business intelligence tools, ERP systems—the list goes on and on. In addition to this, portals provide end users ...