This section describes the life cycle for customizing SOA composite applications. For example, assume the following organizations require use of the same composite, but with slight modifications:

• A core applications development team

• A vertical applications team

• A customer

The core applications development team creates a base customizable composite and delivers it to a vertical applications team that customizes it for a certain industry (for example, telecommunications). The tailored solution is then sold to a telecommunications customer that further customizes the composite for their specific geographic business needs. Essentially, there is a base composite and several layers of customized composites. At a later time in the composite life cycle, the core applications development team creates the next version of the base composite, triggering an upgrade cycle for the vertical applications team and the customer.

Layer values are the values for a given customization layer. It is a one-to-many relationship from a layer to its layer values. You select a layer value from a layer to perform customizations. For example, assume you specify a customization class representing a customization layer called Country. You can then specify countries for its values, such as USA, China, and India. When you restart Oracle JDeveloper in the Customization Developer role to perform customizations, you must select one of the layer values (that is, a country) of the layer from the Oracle JDeveloper Customization Context window such as USA, which means you want to create the customization for that country.