2006 JavaOne Conference - Oracle General Session Details "The Next Application Platform"--Mission Possible!

Oracle Corporation is the world's largest enterprise software company. Having rapidly expanded from its initial offerings in the database realm to application and middleware solutions, the company has a uniquely broad perspective in the IT industry. In today's General Session (Wednesday, May 17, 8:30 to 9:15 AM), Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, Oracle Server Technologies, will outline Oracle's vision of "The Next Application Platform."

At the 2005 JavaOne conference, Kurian detailed the company's multi-pronged approach to the future of enterprise software development. First, the company targeted key technologies they saw as vital to the Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm: JavaServer Faces (JSF) for building user interfaces; Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB 3.0) for building business logic; and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for mapping business process flow. Next, they sought to better facilitate the use of these technologies through tools and technology offerings. Then they set out to take a leadership role in directing and expanding the technologies. And finally, in order to ensure that all members of the developer community would have ready access to the technologies, they pledged to provide a variety of free tool offerings.

"At last year's JavaOne conference, Oracle made a number of commitments to developers in terms of technologies that we'd be supporting," says Dennis MacNeil, Product Director for Java EE at Oracle. "We'll first be reviewing some of those commitments, and then how we've delivered on them-particularly in the areas of UI technologies, like JavaServer Faces, and business logic to run Enterprise JavaBeans. This will then lead into where we're headed in the future--such as where we're going with the new Java Persistence Architecture."

Oracle now offers a broad set of software solutions targeting the enterprise and Service Oriented Architecture. Its high-level Oracle Fusion Middleware is a portfolio of standards-based products--offering Java EE developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management.

Oracle Fusion Middleware's developer-pertinent offerings include: Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Developer Tools.

Oracle Application Server 10g, Release 3 delivers major new SOA functionality, including an integrated Oracle Business Rules engine, and support for the latest web services standards. It offers significant enhancements related to the Oracle JDeveloper IDE and Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework), including JavaServer Faces (JSF) and EJB 3.0 support. Application Server 10g is designed to support both SOA and grid computing solutions, and offers Oracle's "hot-pluggable" architecture, allowing organizations to mix and match Oracle's middleware components with existing infrastructures. Oracle Application Server 10g, Release 3 is certified to interoperate with more than 128 technology products, including many leading open source development tools and runtimes. Oracle SOA Suite, another component of the company's Oracle Fusion Middleware line, offers a complete set of service infrastructure components for creating, deploying, and managing SOA solutions. SOA Suite includes:

Oracle JDeveloper 10g, an integrated SOA development environment for creating applications, that also serves as a unified toolset for all components in the SOA Suite.
Oracle BPEL Process Manager, a business process execution engine for creating, deploying, and managing web services using BPEL. (An XML-based BPEL document defines the business processes connected to a given transaction, and ensures that they are executed in the proper order.)
Oracle Service Registry. When deployed with Oracle Application Server, Oracle SOA Suite components can leverage Oracle Service Registry, a secure UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) v3-compliant registry for publishing and discovering web services.

Like Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle SOA Suite is hot-pluggable, allowing users to deploy solutions on leading Java EE application servers. It is compatible with IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, and JBoss Application Server.

Of additional importance to developers in the Oracle Fusion Middleware portfolio is Oracle Development Tools, an integrated set of application and business intelligence tools. Oracle Development Tools include:

Oracle JDeveloper, a comprehensive Java and web services IDE that eWEEK praised as "second to none."
Oracle BPEL Designer, a feature-rich development tool for Oracle BPEL Process Manager that allows developers to visually model BPEL processes.
Oracle Developer Suite, a family of tools targeting data warehouse design, reporting, business intelligence, and more.
Oracle TopLink and ADF (Application Development Framework), which combine the number one Java object-to-relational persistence architecture with a flexible development framework based upon Struts and JavaServer Faces. The Java Developer's Journal readers voted TopLink as the Best Java Persistence Architecture in 2003. It works with any database,any application server, any development toolset, and any Java EE architecture. And while Oracle JDeveloper 10g is seen as the optimal design time environment for TopLink and ADF, the company is committed to offering freedom of choice here, as well. Developers can access the most advanced functionalities of both TopLink and ADF via the Eclipse IDE.

Oracle JDeveloper 10g is a prime example or Oracle's commitment to ensuring that quality tooling is readily available to the entire enterprise developer community. At the 2005 JavaOne conference, the company announced that they were making JDeveloper available for free. While JDeveloper began as a Java IDE, it is now a broad SOA development environment, with visual and declarative tools for JSP, Struts, JavaServer Faces, BPEL process design, and advanced Web services and portlet functionality. JDeveloper is built on open standards and platforms, and supports all major Java EE application servers and databases.

Oracle is also offering its TopLink Essentials and Oracle ADF Faces products for free. TopLink Essentials is a subset of TopLink, and is the reference implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA). Oracle ADF Faces is a rich set of user interface components based on the Java Server Faces JSR. Oracle has been actively involved with the JSR since its inception. Oracle ADF Faces components provide such built-in functionality as data tables, hierarchical tables, color and date pickers, and more. As a further example of Oracle's commitment to developer freedom of choice, ADF Faces components can be used in any IDE that supports JSF.

"Thomas Kurian will be detailing both products and programs that we'll release to the developer community during the coming year," promises MacNeil. "And he will demo several new Java APIs onstage, showing real life examples of how these technologies can be used." Be sure to stop by the Oracle booth and ask for a free CD containing "Oracle Technology Network's Greatest Hits: Java Edition," containing Java and SOA technical articles, how-to tips, and Oracle Java software. Oracle Java experts will be on hand in the booth, and will conduct mini technical sessions (along with other industry luminaries from the Apache MyFaces and Grails communities) in the Oracle Guru Lounge. And the first 500 developers to fill-out a survey at the booth will receive tickets for the Wednesday night screening of "Mission Impossible III" at the Metreon!

To learn more about Oracle developer initiatives, visit: www.oracle.com/technology.