JSON is flowing through SOA’s veins

This year’s Oracle Open World is again all about Cloud and Mobile. However, this year it is getting more and more concrete. Apart from all the announcements of Process Cloud and integration cloud services there will be more JSON support in Oracle’s SOA Suite.

In Oracle SOA Suite 12C (12.1.3) the REST Adapter already made its appearance. This adapter makes it make your SCA component available as, and leverage REST services, using JSON. This JSON support starts and end with the REST adapter. Inside your SCA components, it is still XML.

In the second release of Oracle SOA Suite 12C (12.1.4) there will be JSON flowing through all the veins of the SCA components. In Service Bus, you will be able to have JSON context variables. Instead of only having xpath operations on your context variables, you have the ability to use JavaScript. There will also be a JavaScript activity which lets you write JavaScript “transformations” on your context variables.

The same goes for BPEL. BPEL is heavily based on XML, but here also the JSON support will be end-to-end. Pretty exiting, but also scary because of the “unstructuredness” of JSON.

Oracle SOA Suite 12.1.4 will probably available in H1 of 2015.