A Practical Application of SOA - A Collaborative Marketplace

The economical context greatly impacts companies and their Information Systems (IS). Companies have new competitors or develop new business skills, delocalize whole or part of their organization. Moreover they are faced with powerful competitors, and new products, fitting customer needs, must be developped fast, sometimes in less than 3 months. These companies’ ISs need to cope with such complex evolutions and have to overcome the resulting changes. Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are widely used by companies to gain in flexibility and Web services, by providing interoperability and loose coupling, is the fitted technical solution used to support SOA. Basic Web services are assembled into composite Web services in order to directly support business processes. The aim of this work is to present a practical and successful application of SOA towards the design of a collaborative marketplace. An implementation in the Oracle environment is achieved using the BPEL Process Manager allowing an integration of the different components involved in the design of a collaborative marketplace. In particular, this paper illustrates, through a practical example, how the SOA approach promotes interoperability, one of its main strengths, by integrating an open source ERP into a mainly ORACLE based software architecture.