What does an integrated suite mean?

or why my glasses are like SOA!

I just got a new pair of glasses.  I think they're pretty cool because they came with some magnetic clip-on sun glasses so when I wear the clip-ons it looks like I am actually wearing sun glasses.  A big increase in my credibility over wearing clip-ons and a lot easier to manage than having seperate prescription sun-glasses.  This got me to thinking about the value of an integrated product suite.
We will very shortly be posting SOA Suite to OTN.  So what does it mean to call it a suite.  I remember our first "suite" release back with iAS version 1.0.2 about 5 years ago and my friend Andrew Whaley described it as similar to a shareware CD with lots of unintegrated components that each needed to be installed seperately.  Whilst writing this blog I kicked off an install of a beta release of SOA suite.

There was a single install program that asked me where I wanted to install the software and away I went.  If you accept the defaults it is a one-click install.  The disks started to whir and away I went.  Whilst it was installing I did other things such as write this blog and tidy up my PC.

Like my prescription glasses with their sun shades the whole of the SOA suite is designed to work together and because it is designe that way it is easy to install and run.

After 40 minutes of disk thrashing (the beta was on the same fragmented hard disk I was installing to) the install was complete without any further user intervention.  This gave me a running SOA suite with the following components installed

Sun JDK 5 Oracle Process Monitoring & Notification Service Apache Perl PHP OC4J ESB BPEL Oracle Rules Engine Oracle Web Sservices Manager Oracle Lite Database

To me this is a great example of what we mean by a suite.  A single install experience that delivers all the infrastructure needed to build an SOA solution, just like my glasses really.