Oracle General Session: Taking Java Enterprise Applications to the Extreme!

To meet the ever-evolving needs of its customers, Oracle has consistently focused on: identifying the core technologies necessary to build mission critical enterprise applications, offering rich and easy-to-use tool sets, and ensuring that these tools sets are made readily available to the developer community.

In Wednesday's General Session (May 9, 8:30 to 9:15 AM), Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Oracle, will present Oracle's vision of the technologies, tools, and standards necessary for enterprise developers to meet the extreme demands of next generation SOA, EDA, and Web 2.0 centered applications.

Oracle's development tool paradigm is one of productivity though standards and simplicity. The Oracle Application Server 10g offers extensive SOA functionality, along with support for the latest web services standards. And the companion JDeveloper 10g product offers a broad SOA development environment, with visual and declarative tools for JSP, Struts, JavaServer Faces, BPEL process design, and advanced web services functionality. JDeveloper includes integrated features for modeling, coding, debugging, testing, profiling, tuning, and deploying. And it is designed to work in tandem with popular open source frameworks, with built-in features for Struts, Ant, JUnit, XDoclets, and CVS. Finally, the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) 10g product offers a comprehensive framework for Java EE developers, including ready-to-use Java EE Design Pattern implementations and metadata-driven components.

Given the full-featured offerings of the current Oracle enterprise application development products, it should come as no surprise to find that the company's upcoming versions will offer an abundance of new features and functionalities. "What we've done is a fairly unique approach," explains Ted Farrell, chief architect and vice president of tools and middleware, Oracle. "In the earlier version of JDeveloper and ADF, we offered a set of JavaServer Faces components (which we later open sourced to Apache under the Trinidad project). These components allowed you to build and render HTML, mobile, and telnet applications--all using the same set of skills. The developer learns just the JavaServer Faces and the JSP, and the framework lets them target these different devices. But with the 11g versions of JDeveloper and ADF, which will be previewed onstage during Thomas Kurian's presentation, we're now adding support for rich internet applications (RIA) to the technology stack—by including a JavaServer Faces render kit for Ajax and Flash. A lot of other vendors are saying that Ajax is this great new way to build RIAs, but then they want developers to go out and be trained in JavaScript and DHTML, as well as in the quirks of the various browsers. Our approach is very different. We're simply working with the Java technology standards—JSP and JavaServer Faces. The ADF framework talks Ajax and Flash--and generates them. So the developers takes the same skills they already have, and can generate a JavaServer Faces Web application, or they can now generate a really cool rich Internet application using Ajax and Flash."

The new features and enhancements to be found in the next versions of Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework will include:

• Advanced tooling and visual development for all Java EE 5 standards and APIs--enabling developers to quickly leverage the latest Java technologies;
  
  
• More than 80 AJAX-enabled, JSF 1.2-based rich client components--for the rapid creation of dynamic and richly interactive user interfaces for Web applications.
  
  
• Enhanced ADF Render Kit--including support for Flash rendering of data visualization components, such as charts, in addition to SVG and PNG output.
  
  
• Enhanced Web services support--including JAX-WS-compliant Web services generation from existing code or WSDL, Web services testing capabilities and improved WSDL editor for simplified Web services development.
  
  
• New JavaScript Editor and debugger

And similar new features and enhancements are to be found in the upcoming Oracle Application Sever, which will also be previewed onstage. "If you look at Java EE 5, developer productivity and ease of use were the main themes," says Steven G. Harris, vice president Java Platform group, Oracle. "And Oracle played a role in that. We were the co-spec lead on EJB 3, and provided the reference implementation for the Java Persistence API within Java EE 5. With this release, we're providing our fully Java EE 5 compliant version of the application server. And it also includes many innovative pieces beyond that, including WS-Policy support, Service Data Object (SDO) support, and the ability to use what we call embeddable containers--for support of the Spring framework, lightweight containers, and access to Spring beans and componentry from within the Java EE 5 life cycle."

The next version of Oracle Application Server will include:

• Java EE 5 compatibility--including support for EJB 3, JPA, JAX-WS, JSF 1.2, and WS-Policy for configuring reliable and secure Web services.
  
  
• Enhanced Oracle TopLink--providing a complete persistence platform, including support for JPA with extensions for advanced ORM functionality, OXM/JAXB, SDO and the ability to expose relational data as Web services.
  
  
• Integration of lightweight containers such as Spring--automatically enabling component model interoperability within the Java EE application lifecycle.
  
  
• Java Transaction Service (JTS) integration--providing built-in kernel support for JTS to enable full transaction interoperability

In further support of the Spring Framework, Oracle will announce at JavaOne the Oracle Development Kit for Spring. This is a set of tools, examples, and tutorials aimed at simplifying development using the Spring Framework. "We see more customers wanting to combine this lightweight container, lightweight development framework, with Java Enterprise Edition, and to make that simple and easy to approach," says Harris.

The development kit package includes the Spring Framework itself, and the Oracle Developer Depot, a free software tool that automates the code discover-to-deploy process. It allows developers to locate Web services code samples (or entire applications) in the "Depot" repository, and then download, install, and run them within seconds. "The development kit also includes an extension to JDeveloper," says Harris, "including wizards and context sensitive highlighting, for developing and configuring Spring applications."

Oracle has collaborated with Interface21 in a number of other Spring Framework related areas. "We're worked with them to make it easy to use TopLink Essentials (which is the open source reference implementation of the Java Persistence API) with Spring," says Harris. "And as part of this release, we're also providing integration code to use the Java Transaction API directly with Spring.

The Oracle Development Kit for Spring will include:

• The Spring Framework 2.0--the latest version of Spring's lightweight, open source application development framework.
  
  
• Oracle JDeveloper Extension for Spring -- providing wizards and full editor support for both Spring 1.x and 2.0-style definitions, complete with code insight, auto-complete and XML validation.
  
  
• Oracle Developer Depota free, Spring-based developer productivity tool that dramatically simplifies the way Java developers find, configure and provision Java applications.
  
  
• Pre-packaged Sample Applications and Tutorials--helping developers to get Spring-based applications up and running quickly;
  
  
• Transaction Manager Integration--allowing developers to leverage the lightweight programming model of Spring with the high-performance transactional capabilities of Oracle Application Server.

As part of Oracle's commitment to making cutting edge tools and technologies readily available to the developer community, the company is open sourcing several portions of its latest offerings at this year's JavaOne Conference. "We're taking the more than 80 Ajax-enabled JavaServer Faces components mentioned earlier, and donating them to the Apache Foundation," says Farrell. "The last set of components that we open sourced to Apache had a really good reception, and we built a great community around that. And we're also donating components of the Oracle Development Kit for Spring to the Spring community!"

Be sure to stop by the Oracle booth and pick-up a free 2-DVD software set (containing Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle JDeveloper, OC4J, Oracle Database XE, and Oracle WebCenter) while they last! And meet Oracle Java experts such as Mike Keith, Tug Grall, and Shay Shmeltzer in the booth, or attend mini-sessions in the Oracle Guru Lounge. Meanwhile, the first 500 visitors to the Oracle booth to complete a brief survey will get a free pass for a special screening of Spider-Man 3 at The Metreon on Wednesday night. Swing on by!