Over the past several years, we have seen a growing momentum in the adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures, which continues to accelerate. At this point in its evolution, SOA has started to cross the chasm between the early-adopter, bleeding-edge IT architects and the mainstream IT and software development community. And what enables this progression to continue gathering steam is the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and lessons learned between the early adopters in the community and those following their footsteps. As such, I am very enthusiastic about Oracle SOA Suite Developer Guide because Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds are exactly the right people to share this knowledge with us.

I joined Oracle in 2004 through the acquisition of Collaxa, which is where the Oracle BPEL Process Manager came from. At Collaxa, I was responsible for all the interfaces between our SOA products and our customers and the developer community. It was very clear, shortly after the acquisition, that the Oracle field was going to be a tremendous asset to the adoption of our products, our customers' success, and to the advancement of SOA in general.

As Oracle became a leader in the SOA space over the next several years, building out a full SOA platform through continued development and further acquisitions, Antony and Matt continued to stand out as leaders among the special community of Oracle SOA field representatives. Along the way, they built a knowledge base that enabled customers to get over (and better yet, avoid...) common hurdles, and feed customer requirements back into the engineering organization. We are highly appreciative of the fact that they have undertaken the monumental task of incorporating this knowledge into a book that is built on the existing documentation, and will provide great value to experienced SOA practitioners and newbies alike.

SOA is about more than just tools, a fact that is clear even to those of us who work for software vendors. However, to be effective with any software development products, requires detailed knowledge of the products, APIs, features, and capabilities. Antony and Matt cover these basics in this book in great detail.

But even more importantly, developers need to know about edge cases, design patterns, and how these products fit into the full development life cycle. This information comes best from real-world experiences with the products, even more than from the people who build a product. It is particularly valuable that Antony and Matt focus the majority of the content in this book on deeper topics such as SOA exception handling, full life cycle support for testing, security, and migration across environments. If I had a quarter for every customer who has asked me, over the past eight years, about best practices to move their SOA composites from dev to test to production... well, let's just say you can save your quarters and read Chapter 18 instead.

Finally, even as SOA adoption matures, it is still important to understand why you are adopting SOA, what the expected benefits are, and to measure your progress toward those as objectively as possible. Today, most people state goals such as:

I believe that this book, coming from pragmatic practitioners in the field, will specifically help developers realize these benefits from their SOA implementations by providing clear and useful information on Oracle's SOA platform.

On behalf of the Oracle SOA Engineering and Product Management team, as well as all the customers and partners who have asked for this book, we heartily thank Antony and Matt for the investment of their time and energy, and hope that this book helps you achieve your SOA goals.

David Shaffer Vice President, Product Management Oracle Integration [email protected]