Oracle Fusion Middleware for Developers

Q&A with Thomas Kurian

Now a visible leader in the middleware market and Java developer community, Oracle demonstrated major momentum during 2005 with its Oracle Fusion Middleware product family. One of the primary forces behind that momentum is Thomas Kurian, Oracle's Senior Vice President for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Recently, Oracle Technology Network asked Thomas for his perspective on the year that was and the year ahead for Oracle Fusion Middleware—with a particular emphasis on efforts in the developer community.

OTN: It's been quite a year for Oracle in the middleware space. From your perspective, what are the highlights from 2005 that are most relevant to the developer community?
Kurian: I view 2005 as a breakthrough year for Oracle Fusion Middleware. We did a lot with the business—grew dramatically faster than the market pace (24%), solidified our position as the fastest-growing middleware platform, delivered a comprehensive SOA Suite, expanded our "Hot-Pluggable" capabilities, and certified our middleware products with PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications. From a developer point of view, we also became much more of a community leader in defining the Java platform and took a new and important leadership role in building open source development tools.

"JDeveloper has really evolved into comprehensive SOA development environment"

OTN: You mentioned Open Source development tools. Oracle has been in the spotlight this past year for its work in developer tools both with Oracle JDeveloper and Eclipse. And recently, claims have been made about Oracle's support for NetBeans. Can you elaborate on Oracle's development tools strategy?
Kurian: At Oracle, we have our own development tool, Oracle JDeveloper, which is available for free download. Our new version, JDeveloper 10g Release 3, has a extensive list of new features and is the single biggest release we have ever done of the product. JDeveloper has really evolved to become a comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) development environment with support for orchestrating BPEL process flows, building portlets, scripting, building Web services, and developing J2EE applications.

Because we are committed to providing developers with choice, we are also taking a leadership role within the Eclipse community. We are currently leading three different groups within the Eclipse Foundation for Java and BPEL technologies, and we are actively involved in integrating our Fusion Middleware products with Eclipse. Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse. We certainly think Sun's NetBeans initiative is important in the marketplace, and we're watching it very closely. But as of right now, Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse and we have no plans to adopt either NetBeans or any of its technology. Any statements to the contrary by anyone else in the industry are not true.

OTN: You also mentioned that Oracle became more of a leader in defining the Java Platform and leading the community during 2005. Can you elaborate?
Kurian: Well, we are already a leader and contributor in over 50 new specifications for the JCP, OASIS, WS-I, W3C, Liberty, OMG and several other standard bodies. And as I mentioned, we are leading projects in Eclipse, such as JavaServer Faces (JSF) Tooling, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 Tooling, and BPEL. Additionally, we are the co-specification lead for the EJB 3.0 specification and are leveraging some of the best practices from building our TopLink product to build the persistence layer of the EJB 3.0 Reference Implementation. This will be something that's available in the GlassFish open source project for J2EE. Furthermore, we are now a core contributor to the Apache MyFaces project and recently co-authored the Service Component Architecture and Service Data Object specifications for SOA development.

"Standards are central to Oracle's vision and product strategy for Oracle Fusion Middleware"

OTN: What is Oracle's philosophy with respect to adopting standards? Are there guiding principles in determining what standards to support and adopt?
Kurian: Standards are central to Oracle's vision and product strategy for Oracle Fusion Middleware. In my mind, there are three driving reasons behind our support for standards.

The first is, by having a standard, do we make it simpler for developers to build applications? Take Enterprise JavaBeans, for example. That's an area where we came up with some technology with Oracle TopLink that eventually helped to define a standard way for people to persist Java objects. And the real value of that is that it makes it much simpler to build more efficient database-backed Java applications. Now we could have kept this as a proprietary feature, but the reason we put it out there is to give developers a standard way that they can build J2EE applications by leveraging that set of services. So when we look at what standards we help define, the first question is: Does it simplify the developer's life?

The second is, does this standard provide choices to customers? For example, one of the key values of J2EE is that it gives customers the choice of having multiple vendors' solutions concurrently within the organization, or serially within the organization, meaning you bet on using one company's technology for a period of time, and if it doesn't pan out, you're not locked in, and you have the choice to migrate it to another vendor's solution going forward. Without adhering to standards, it would be difficult to ensure that the customer doesn't get locked-in.

The third reason we look at standards is for interoperability, whether they allow customers to take existing or legacy applications and interface them with new applications, or to interface their business to another company's business. Interoperability is what's driving the trend toward SOA. Oracle's support for industry and technical standards and specifications is what enables Oracle Fusion Middleware's "Hot-Pluggable" capabilities.

OTN: What do you mean by "Hot-Pluggable"? Is this something unique to Oracle?
Kurian: "Hot-Pluggable" describes how you can mix and match components from Oracle Fusion Middleware with your existing infrastructure. For example, you can use Oracle BPEL Process Manager with BEA WebLogic or IBM WebSphere. It also means that you can easily integrate open source technologies like Spring or Struts with Oracle Application Server. We were able to create a "Hot-Pluggable" architecture by designing a unique class loader mechanism that makes it easier to integrate with third-party technologies and by basing all of the components on technology standards. Only Oracle offers this combination to create a true "Hot-Pluggable" architecture.

OTN: What are some of the things we can look forward to from Oracle in 2006?
Kurian: There are lots of exciting things planned for 2006. While I can't reveal all of them to you right now, I will tell you that we're really excited about the upcoming release of Oracle JDeveloper 10g Release 3, which will feature end-to-end support for industry standards such as JSF, EJB 3.0, and BPEL. I can also promise we will continue to take a leadership role in building open source development tools with the kind of work we are doing in the Eclipse Foundation today.