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FROM THE EDITOR
In Search Of
By Jeff Spicer
Oracle Magazine finds the world's most innovative Oracle technologists.
In this issue of Oracle Magazine I'm very proud to introduce the 21 recipients of our second annual Editors' Choice Awards. The people and groups we selected for this honor are at work today on some of the world's most original and innovative IT projects with Oracle's products and technologies. In addition to sharing a natural curiosity for the application of technology to complex business problems, this group of technologists also shares a willingness to work with Oracle, providing the company with valuable feedback about its own products and services.
We greatly expanded the number of award categories this year to better represent the breadth and use of Oracle products and the changing IT landscape in which they're applied. For example, Linux and open-source technologies continue to grow in importance to businesses of all sizes, so we added categories this year to call attention to developers doing outstanding and groundbreaking work in those areas. An increasing number of developers are using Oracle JDeveloper to create Web services, and they're extending JDeveloper in an open, standards-based way, sharing their extensions with other developers. We felt it was time to recognize exceptional work with extensions. We also realized that developers and DBAs don't learn new technologies in a vacuum—they turn to experts for advice and instruction. Therefore, we felt it was critical to recognize authors and teachers. And of course, we kept many of our traditional categories, to recognize superior performance of DBAs, IT managers, and PL/SQL developers.
Finding suitable candidates for our awards was itself a relatively simple task. We enlisted the help of many independent Oracle users' groups, online technology communities, technology book publishers, our own sales and marketing forces, and Oracle consultants for recommendations. Narrowing that list of hundreds of people down to a mere 21, however, was not a simple task. Many categories contained a host of candidates whose individual accomplishments and mastery of technology were seemingly equal, and in these cases we asked ourselves which candidates had done more to share their knowledge of technology within their company, with a broad base of Oracle users, or with Oracle itself, for one of the chief criteria in all our award categories is the active sharing—and in fact advocacy—of technology innovation and best practices. Learn more about this year's award recipients here.
Oracle Application Server 10g Debuts
In the last issue of Oracle Magazine we began introducing you to the new Oracle 10g family of grid-aware Oracle products. We wrote about Oracle Database 10g, highlighting the many new management and clustering capabilities that enable the database to be used in an enterprise grid computing environment. In this issue, we focus on the debut of Oracle Application Server 10g and how the new application server brings the advantages of enterprise grid computing to the middle tier.
A typical middle tier runs a host of applications and services on a variety of servers and platforms. Often many of these applications have dedicated computing resources—resources that aren't used to their full capacity much of the time. To address this and many of the other issues that add to middle-tier complexity, Oracle designed its new application server
for use in enterprise computing grid environments and gave
it the ability to run applications based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework.
Incorporated into the new application server are several new services that allow an administrator to "virtualize" all middle-tier services and resources, managing them from a single console as if they were one. New services such as Policy-Based Workload Management and Automated Application Performance Management let a manager set up a sophisticated system for allocating resources dynamically and on demand. And, using the new Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, an administrator can use a Web browser to monitor and manage grid resources from any location. These are but a few of the many grid-enabling features of the new application server—read more in Philip Gill's article. And in the next issue of Oracle Magazine, we'll continue our profiles of Oracle's line of 10g products, introducing you to the grid-enabled application development products.
Jeff Spicer, Editor in Chief
jeff.spicer@oracle.com
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