Oracle SOA 12c comes with many new features mostly for developers to deliver integrations rapidly.
Saving the BPEL. The activities as templates is the most common use case I have used whilst in development. This enables us to adhere to corporate standard for developing integrations. Unlike SOA 11g where we used to copy paste code, SOA12c templates makes it easy for developers.
The Managed File Transfer (MFT) is a great addition to the product set managing all our file transfer capability, encryption, decryption, monitoring, visibility and resubmission of transfer. It integrates with SOA Suite seamlessly.
For Oracle Service Bus, there is no more Eclipse and only a single JDeveloper for all development and EM consoles for monitoring.
REST support for both SOA and OSB greatly enhance the product capability for mobile and cloud integration. Inbuilt continuous integration capability through JDeveloper. It has more adapter support for cloud integration than before.
For one of the customer where an on-premise application needed to be integrated with cloud, the integration is done using SOA Suite, reducing the development time due to the use of templates. Also, MFT handles all kinds of secure file exchange reducing the cost for having and managing multiple FTP servers. The same templates are used for other customers too reducing further our development time and delivering quality product.
For REST support, the product internally converts to a SOAP WSDL format, and I would like to see the product only work to REST standards. It would be nice if we could rename a SOA composite feature and have pre-built templates with best practises implemented.
I've been using it for the last seven years, and 12c for the last 10 months.
We have encountered no issues with its stability.
It’s a scalable application.
I have never used any other product.
For trying out a developer edition, the installation was easy unlike previous versions. The automatic upgrade from 11g to 12c was not painful.
We implemented it on our own.
You should use the new MFT, templates, REST features, and cloud adapters to get the best out of it.