A quick tour of the broad set of products under the Oracle Fusion Middleware umbrella.
Simon Haslam, Principal Consultant, Veriton & myself published an middleware article in the UKOUG Scene magazine. This article arose because Jürgen Kress’“Fusion Middleware Architecture Overview”
abstract was one of the most highly rated submissions for UKOUG 2012, so it seemed there
might be an interest in trying to clarify the products that Oracle calls ‘Fusion Middleware.’
Little did we realise how many products there were…
Fusion Middleware – what is it?
‘Middleware,’ as its name suggests, is a generic term for the layers of software (or ‘software glue’– see http://www.middleware.org/whatis.html) that sit between an application and, within enterprise software, typically services and resources like the Oracle Database. Oracle Fusion Middleware started off as the Java EE application server (Internet Application Server) but evolved to cover pretty much all software that isn’t the database or applications!
Why is Fusion Middleware important?
Middleware provides infrastructure services to enable applications to run. For example, if you want a ‘container’ (i.e. a server with very specific APIs) to run your enterprise Java application, and most likely connect to a relational database, you use WebLogic Server; if your application wants to use web services somewhere out in the ether it calls the Oracle Service Bus. As you can tell these Middleware services are vital to the successful and continuing operation of your application. For a long
time Middleware has been seen as the poor relation to the database (which holds the irreplaceable business data) but this is changing as Middleware is now providing integration of, and decoupling from, the underlying resources, plus there is an increased demand for 24/7 (or close) availability of applications for use by customers, partners.. read the full article here and get your Scene magazine copy as a UKOUG member .
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