Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Architecture and Management (Oracle Press) [Formato Kindle]

First I would like to say this is a very good and thorough overview of the architecture of Fusion Middleware. If you are new to Fusion Middleware and would like a good introduction, this would be a good book for you. On the other hand, if you are already familiar with the technologies, there isn't a lot here for you.

I bought this book looking for something more on the management and administration side. It barely scratches the surface. There are a few highlights here and there, but for the most part it just discusses the technologies and doesn't really tell you how to manage them.

It covers SOA in one chapter, which is inadequate to really get a good grasp of managing it. It tells you how to deploy a composite, but not how to undeploy one. There are two sentences on fault management. It basically says that enterprise manager allows you to examine faults.

Of course to cover all of the technologies thorougly in one book would be impractical.

If the authors would have called this book Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture and left Management off. I would have rated it higher.

I need to be prepared to support Fusion Applications. I found many resources and among them were three books from Oracle Press. This is the third of them. The first was Managing Oracle Fusion Applications and the second was Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Administration Handbook. Since I have reviewed other Oracle Press books, they sent me copies of each to read and review.

Fusion Applications is built on top of Fusion Middleware. Understanding the components of Fusion Middleware and how they are managed is a critical part of supporting Fusion Applications.

I learned things in this book that have really helped me understand other parts of Fusion Applications. Of the three books, I thought this one wouldn't tell me as much due to its focus on Fusion Middleware. I was wrong. Because Fusion Middleware is the foundation of Fusion Applications, I learned many things in this book that were not mentioned in the other two. I think that resources that focus on Fusion Applications, or on WebLogic Server, tend to assume you know all about Fusion Middleware. It is also true that Fusion Applications and Fusion Middleware are such big topics, spanning so many areas, that it just isn't practical to cover Fusion Middleware topics and anything else in one volume.

I'm glad I read this book in addition to the books on WLS Administration and Managing Fusion Applications. It would have been easy to dismiss this book because I thought I needed to focus only on Fusion Applications. Middleware has become so important to the development and operation of modern enterprise applications that it is critical to give more attention to this area. Fusion Applications is completely dependent on Fusion Middleware. The components of Fusion Middleware such as WebLogic Server are also appearing in other Oracle products, not just Fusion Applications. I would suggest that anyone using Oracle software should become familiar with Fusion Middleware, and this book is a great way to do so.

This book provides a great overview of Oracle's Fusion Middleware, and serves as a reference for those that really need to understand the architecture and manage an enterprise deployment. Most importantly, this book covers the entire technical stack and shows you how each piece relates to the other. What I found valuable about this book is that after the product overview, each functional area is explained more deeply, and then an actual use case is provided. For me, it helped to ensure that I really understood each of the components functionality, and went deeper than the Oracle documentation and whitepapers on OTN.

The second part of the book is more hands on with details of managing a fmw environment. So if you are already familiar with the Middleware components, or don't need to have an overview of all of them now, you might skip the first section of this book and dive into the details of managing or optimizing your deployment. There are plenty of good tips here.

Despite the breadth and complexity of Fusion Middleware, I think the authors do a good job in getting the most important points across with solid examples and use cases. In particular the second chapter does a really good job of explaining WebLogic Server, which is entirely new for the 11g release. Understanding WebLogic Server is fundamental to understanding how the whole product now works. All in all, this is an invaluable reference if you work with fusion middleware, or want to learn more about it.