Oracle Corp. Wednesday is expected to announce the release of its Oracle Application Server 10g, the company's first application server to support grid computing.
"We're releasing the first grid-capable application server this week, the Oracle Application Server 10g, which includes nearly 600 new features," said Robert Shimp, vice president of technology management at Oracle. "It's a major release for us."
Officials at the Redwood Shores, Calif., company said Oracle has been working on a grid solution in its research groups for the last couple of years and has been using grid technology internally. Oracle first discussed Oracle Application Server 10g at its OracleWorld conference in San Francisco in September.
The Oracle Application Server 10g features advanced business integration features and support for the Web Services Interoperability Organization's (WS-I's) standards.
Shim said Oracle has added business process management technology in the application server, and it features a service-oriented architecture development platform.
Pricing for the system is $5,000 per processor for the Java edition, $10,000 per processor for the standard edition and $20,000 per processor for the enterprise edition, Shim said.
Oracle supports the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) standards, which are focused on developing a grid systems architecture based on Web services, company officials said
Part of Oracle's strategy for the Oracle Application Server 10g includes Web services management features to foster reuse of applications and services. The new grid-based Oracle application server features an upgrade of the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), which is a services-based framework for building reusable services for applications.
In addition, with the new Oracle 10g platform, users will be able to run existing applications without having to optimize them for the grid, the company said.
With this new release, Oracle officials said the company took the product through more than 11,000 beta testing hours and 87,000 hours of live deployment. In addition, Oracle Application Server 10g and related technologies incorporate more than 100 patented and patent-pending features, they said. And, they added, Oracle has also led or participated in the creation of more than 100 Web services and Java standards through the Java Community Process (JCP).
Next page: Oracle JDeveloper 10g preview.
Also Wednesday, Oracle is expected to release Oracle JDeveloper 10g preview, a preview version of its upcoming development tool for building applications for the Oracle Application Server 10g environment. The free preview will give developers early access to the upcoming release, said Vijay Tella, vice president and chief strategy officer of Oracle Application Server. The production release of the product is scheduled for release early next year, Tella said.
In addition, Tella said, Oracle will ship a version of its application server that supports Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 in the first half of 2004.
Oracle JDeveloper 10g also features the Oracle ADF technology, which provides a "productivity layer" that helps developers of various skill levels create J2EE applications and Web services ready to run in grid environments, officials said. In addition, they said, the Oracle ADF helps prepare developers for service-oriented architectures.
Oracle JDeveloper 10g is an integrated development environment for building Java, XML and SQL applications; business intelligence; UML modeling; and J2EE Web services, the company said.
The Oracle JDeveloper 10g developer preview will be available for free download Wednesday from the Oracle developer community Web site, Oracle Technology Network.
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