Oracle Offers AJAX Bits, New SOA Framework

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Oracle is jumping into AJAX  in a big way with news it would donate more than 80 AJAX components to the Apache Software Foundation under an open source license.

These components do a variety of tasks, such as data binding between Java and services like e-mail, voice and video data and instant messaging. In addition, Oracle  is donating advanced tooling and visual development for all Java EE 5 standards and APIs , an enhanced ADF Render Kit for graphics rendering and enhanced Web services support.

“We are contributing technology to create new opportunities for the Java community,” said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president for Oracle Application Server 10g in his keynote speech here at the JavaOne conference.

“You hear a lot about AJAX. It’s about bringing interactivity into applications that are in the browser,” he said. “Traditional AJAX has required the developer to program in java-script. Many people find that complex.”

Oracle also announced the Oracle Development Kit or the Spring Framework, which is designed to simplify the development and deployment of Spring-based applications that use Oracle’s Java tools and middleware.

Kurian used his keynote to highlight a new architecture for Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s next-generation middleware, which is designed to provide a unified infrastructure for grid computing, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).

Current middleware offerings only permit organizations to support SOAs, event processing, and grid computing at the edge of the network, which means components for all three must be deployed as separate entities. Fusion Middleware will allow each component of their application platform be supported at the core of the middleware platform for greater performance.

Fusion Middlware will also feature a service infrastructure based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard, which Oracle co-developed. SCA is an initiative for delivering applications that conform with the principles of SOA and will allow developers to rapidly build SOA apps.

Kurian said there’s new kind of application called a “composite app” – which sounds an awful lot like “mash-ups”  — applications that combine different kinds of services. The applications consist of a UI, business logic, business processes and two kinds of interfaces, a service interface for synchronous use and an event interface for asynchronous use.

This means the apps can be called by other objects and services, or by human interaction. SCA “provides a standard way for these kinds of apps to be wired together. We build an SCA infrastructure based on the Spring framework, which is very modular and lightweight, with many capabilities,” said Kurian.

The service infrastructure should provide better performance of intra-service and component communication, as well as an enhanced, seamless security framework with built-in policy enforcement points for authentication, authorization and encryption. “From our point of view, this is very easy and very accessible to every developer,” said Kurian.