Oracle SALT Overview

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E13161_01/salt/docs10gr3/overview/over.html

Understanding Oracle SALT

Oracle Service Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT) is an add-on product option for Tuxedo, enabling Tuxedo applications to participate in SOA environments. Oracle SALT has two major components: native Web services stack and SCA container.

Oracle SALT allows external Web services applications to invoke Tuxedo services as Web services, and Tuxedo applications to invoke external Web services. Oracle SALT does not require any coding to achieve this. In addition, Oracle SALT includes an SCA container, which allows you to develop new SOA applications focusing on business logic, while still taking advantage of Tuxedo infrastructure. SCA container also helps with effective reuse of existing application assets.

Understanding Oracle SALT Web Services

Oracle SALT complies with standard Web service specifications (SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, and WSDL 1.1), allowing Oracle SALT to interoperate with other Web service products and Oracle SALT Overview development toolkits. Tuxedo applications can easily integrate with Web services applications using Oracle SALT.

What Are Web Services?

Web services are a set of functions packaged into a single entity made available to other systems on a network. They can be shared and used as a component of distributed Web-based applications. The network can be a corporate intranet or the Internet. Other systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, order-processing systems, and other existing back-end applications, can call these functions to request data or perform an operation. Because Web services rely on standard technologies which most systems provide, they are an excellent means for connecting distributed systems together.

The software industry has evolved toward loosely coupled service-oriented applications that interact dynamically over the Web. The applications break down the larger software system into smaller modular components, or shared services. These services can reside on different computers and can be implemented by vastly different technologies. They are packaged and made accessible using standard Web protocols, such as XML and HTTP.

Web services share the following properties that make them easily accessible from heterogeneous environments:

• Web services are accessed using widely supported Web protocols such as HTTP.
• Web services describe themselves using an XML-based description language.

Web services communicate with clients (both end-user applications or other Web services) through simple XML messages that can be produced or parsed by virtually any programming environment or manually, if necessary.

Why Use Oracle SALT?

Oracle SALT is a native Tuxedo Web service integration solution. It reduces Tuxedo/Web service integration costs and decreases conversion processes that may exist with other solutions for accessing Tuxedo services. It enables seamless connectivity between Tuxedo applications and external Web service applications.

Oracle SALT allows existing Tuxedo services (inbound) to be easily exposed as Web services without additional programming tasks. It also allows you to create native Tuxedo applications that access external Web services (outbound) transparently.

Major Web services benefits include:

• Interoperability among distributed applications that span diverse hardware and software platforms
• Easy, widespread access to applications using Web protocols
• A cross-platform, cross-language data model (XML) that facilitates developing heterogeneous distributed applications

Figure 1 illustrates how the Oracle SALT gateway is used in the Tuxedo framework.

Figure 1 Oracle SALT Gateway in Tuxedo Infrastructure

Understanding the Oracle SALT SCA Container

Oracle SALT provides an SCA Container for new application development. The SCA container, which is based on standard SCA programming and assembly model, allows customers to focus on business logic without having to learn many middleware APIs. Use of SCA standard allows you to use SCA tools to develop and assemble applications. The SCA container still leverages all the benefits of Tuxedo infrastructure, such as reliability, availability, scalability and performance.

SCA container also improves interoperability and extensibility of existing and new Tuxedo applications by making it easier to interoperate with SOA environments.

Figure 2 shows an application based on SCA assembly and programming model. The application contains many services, offered by SCA components. These components include components hosted in SCA container as well as legacy components accessed from SCA components.

Figure 2 SCA Application