Binding components establish the connection between a SOA composite application and the external world. There are two types of binding components:

• Services

  Provide the outside world with an entry point to the SOA composite application. The WSDL file of the service advertises its capabilities to external applications. These capabilities are used for contacting the SOA composite application components. The binding connectivity of the service describes the protocols that can communicate with the service (for example, SOAP/HTTP or REST binding).

• References

  Enable messages to be sent from the SOA composite application to external services in the outside world. For REST bindings, a Web Application Description Language (WADL) file advertises the capabilities to external applications.

Figure 36-1 shows an OrderBookingComposite project in which a service (UpdateOrderStatus) in the Exposed Services swimlane provides the entry point to the composite and a reference (BAM_OrderDO) in the External References swimlane enables information to be sent to an Oracle BAM Server in the outside world.

Binding components enable you to integrate the following types of technologies with SOA composite applications:

• SOAP web services

• HTTP binding

• JCA adapters

• Oracle E-Business Suite

• Oracle BAM 11g (This adapter can only connect to an Oracle BAM 11g server.)

• Oracle B2B

• Oracle Healthcare

• Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT)

• ADF-BC services

• EJB services

• Direct binding services

• REST binding

• Cloud adapters

These technologies are described in the following sections.