eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Oracle opened its Oracle OpenWorld conference with a series of SOA-related announcements, including the availability of Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3.
With service-oriented architecture as one of the themes of the event, Oracle opened the conference on Oct. 23 in San Francisco with the new component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The new version of Oracle SOA Suite 10g includes enhancements that simplify SOA deployment and installation, including a one-click install; an enhanced ESB (Enterprise Service Bus); expanded human workflow capabilities; enhanced Web services security and interoperability facilities; and new SOA governance support.
The products enhanced ESB can reduce the amount of programming required to connect heterogeneous services and applications in an SOA, the company said. Meanwhile, the suites orchestration component, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, delivers expanded human workflow capabilities that provide a simplified workflow designer and new algorithms for managing complex task routing and escalation. This component also includes a new testing framework that automates process testing and service simulation for SOA applications.
In addition, Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3 includes facilities to identify, categorize, version and publish services to an Enterprise Service Registry; facilities to securely view services within the enterprise and to govern the provisioning of new services; facilities to centralize the management of security polices and service-level agreements; out-of-the-box functionality to implement governance requirements for business process auditing; and metadata repository services to capture and track service interactions and store SOA artifacts and metadata for Web services, the company said.
Moreover, the new version features improved reuse of services and components, as well as an SOA design and implementation methodology, Oracle officials said.
“SOA is rapidly becoming the standard way for customers to derive added business value from their current IT investments and to integrate disparate applications and services,” said Amlan Debnath, Oracles vice president of server technologies, in a statement.
“As adoption of SOA moves out of the early-adopter stage and into the mainstream market, customers are asking for SOA infrastructure components that are easy to install, implement and manage,” said Brian Erickson, managing vice president of strategic technology solutions for Hitachi Consulting, in a statement.
However, Bill Roth, vice president of BEA Systems Workshop Business Unit, said of Oracles SOA news: “We have been talking about SOA since 2003, and IBM has recently painted a good part of its software with a lovely coat of SOA paint. [From Oracle] expect another Me Too announcement on how everything they do is SOA, and comes from the database.”
Oracle also announced expanded support of open standards for building, deploying, managing and securing service-oriented applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware.
To simplify the development of data-intensive applications, Oracle supports Java Server Faces, Apache Struts, Java Persistence Architecture, EJB 3.0, Service Data Objects, REST and Spring Framework 2.0, the company said
Oracle also supports component-oriented SOA infrastructure and applications through Java API for XML RPC, Java API for XML Web Services, Services Component Architecture, XML Query, XPath, XSLT, Java Business Integration, Business Process Execution Language 2.0, Business Process Modeling Notation, Business Process Domain Metamodel, WS-Policy, WS-Distributed Management, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing and WS-Eventing, the company said.
In addition, Oracle supports AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), RSS, Adobe Flash and others. And the company supports key industry standards in the telecommunications, health care, retail and high technology industries like SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), ParLAY Web Services, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and Java API for Internetworking. Oracle also supports key technologies such as Electronics Product Code (EPCGlobal) for RFID, ebXML (Electronic Business Markup Language for XML), HL7, RosettaNet, EDI X12, EDIFact, EDI AS/2 (EDI over the Internet) and others.
“Standards have always been central to Oracles product strategy because our customers are looking for simplicity, choice and interoperability in their IT environments,” said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies, in a statement.
In other news at the show, Oracle announced the Oracle Developer Depot, a free, downloadable developer productivity tool that simplifies the way Java developers find, configure and provision Java applications for learning or prototyping purposes.
Company officials said Oracle Developer Depot leverages popular Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, the Spring 2.0 Framework and RSS to facilitate code reuse and simplify the development process.
“Oracle Developer Depot makes it simple and fast to locate cool and useful Java applications, and download and install them in one easy step, complete with source code,” said Steven Harris, vice president of Oracles Java Platform Group, in a statement.