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From the Editor
Developing News
By Jeff Spicer
Highlights of recent developer news from Oracle
Oracle's strategy of offering a complete and integrated set of application development tools that supports any development approach, any technology platform, and any operating system provides great flexibility to application developers. Add to that Oracle's support for standards and the company's embrace of the latest concepts such aspect-oriented programming, and you've got a winning choice for developer tools. The only downside in all of this is keeping up with the changes coming from Oracle. Here's an overview of the major developer-related news from Oracle during the past 12 months.
Oracle Jumps to the Forefront of BPEL
Perhaps the biggest developer news from Oracle during the past year was the release of Oracle BPEL Process Manager. The composite application development and BPM tool, the result of Oracle's Collaxa acquisition, includes several design-time options, industry-leading runtime performance, and extensive management and monitoring capabilities. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is rapidly being adopted as the industry standard for orchestrating business processes. Key benefits are reuse and portability—welcome news to a space that's been dominated by proprietary languages and competing standards.
Developers can use this tool to quickly assemble a set of services into a BPEL-based process flow. BPEL can coordinate not only simple flows but also sophisticated interactions, and BPEL processes can interact with everything from XML-based Web services to JCA, JMS, workflows, and e-mails. Called the cornerstone of service-oriented architecture, BPEL is a natural fit for integrating cross-application business processes and handling the coordination of services and other systems involving even the largest, most complex composite applications. The newest addition to Oracle's middleware portfolio—which spans J2EE deployment to security and identity management—benefits from the performance of Oracle Application Server 10g, and customers can run Oracle BPEL Process Manager on other major application servers.
More J2EE Development Support
Java developers are aware of Oracle JDeveloper 10g's Application Development Framework (ADF), a framework based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that offers a visual, declarative environment for building applications. But those developers might not be aware of how much Oracle ADF has matured in just the past year, the most noticeable improvement being the addition of Oracle ADF Faces Components, a set of user interface components based on the JavaServer Faces JSR (JSF; JSR-127). Oracle ADF Faces Components provides user-interface components with built-in functionality, such as data tables and color and date pickers, that can be customized and reused in an application.
Oracle is rapidly moving toward full support of JSF. The most recent release of Oracle JDeveloper 10g has design-time support for JSF, including the reference implementation of JSF (1.1_01), which is bundled with Oracle JDeveloper. A collection of JSF components (ADF Faces) is available as an Early Adopter release.
In the EJB world, Oracle recently released Oracle Application Server EJB 3.0, helping simplify Java application development. You'll find much more information and a download link on OTN.
Increased Support for .NET
Oracle has offered Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) since 2002. ODP.NET is a native driver built on ADO.NET specifications supporting Oracle features. ODP.NET 10g, released last year, gives .NET developers more access to even more Oracle Database functionality, including Oracle Real Application Clusters, XML DB, and advanced security.
Earlier this year, Oracle announced additional support for .NET developers with Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET and Oracle Database Extensions for .NET. Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET is an add-in that developers can use to browse Oracle schema, launch designers and wizards to create and alter schema objects, and drag and drop schema objects, automatically generating code. (Oracle has a test version of the plug-in on OTN, with a production release planned for May.) Oracle Database Extensions for .NET will provide the Oracle database with a .NET Common Language Runtime. These extensions, scheduled for availability later this year, will allow stored procedures written in VB.NET, C#, or C++ to run inside the database.
Jeff Spicer, Editor in Chief
jeff.spicer@oracle.com
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