Oracle Corp. Monday is expected to announce a new version of its application server at the companys Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco.
Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3, expected in the first half of next year, features support for SOAs (service-oriented architectures) and a variety of middleware components, as well as enhanced security and key Java and Web services standards.
Thomas Kurian, Oracles senior vice president of Fusion Middleware Development, said the new application server will be a primary component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and will help organizations develop and deploy SOAs on a grid computing architecture, among other features.
Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 features a hot-pluggable architecture that supports a broad range of middleware components, including open-source software such as Spring, Apache Struts, Apache Axis, Apache MyFaces, Hibernate, Tapestry, JUnit, CVS, SubVersion, Ant, Eclipse and Log4J, the company said. In addition, Oracle officials said Release 3 will support more than 128 products, including middleware products such as Microsoft .Net, IBM WebSphere, IBM MQ-Series, Cisco Local Director, F5 Big IP, Checkpoint firewalls, and content management and systems management products.
Meanwhile, the new application server release will support developer-centric features such as code refactoring, as well as support for Java 5.0, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4, JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Struts-based development environments. Some new features come from Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Developer Framework, the company said.
Moreover, Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 features Web services support such as compliance with the Web Services Interoperability Organizations basic profile, and support for Web services standards such as WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security, WS-Federation, Web Services Metadata, Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) and REST (Representational State Transfer) Web Services, the company said.
The new application server also features enhanced security in the way of support for Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) 1.0 and 2.0, advanced single sign-on capabilities and additional tools for securely managing Web services and SOAs, the company said. In addition, Oracles federation product, Oracle COREid Federation, delivers several new features, including seamless single sign-on and identity sharing across business partners using a multiprotocol gateway that supports industry standards such as Liberty, WS-Federation and SAML 2.0, the company said.
“The advancements in this release will deliver to customers a comprehensive SOA platform enabling them to increase business agility and get the most from existing and future IT investments,” Kurian said in a statement. “Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 mirrors the actual needs of real companies. The hot-pluggable architecture will allow companies to get exactly what they need by easily mixing and matching existing and new systems. Since the product is backward compatible, Oracle customers will be able to quickly and easily upgrade from Oracle Application Server 10g Release 1 and 2 to Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3.”
