With over 600 new features, including the ability to integrate business applications, manage business processes and a Web Services infrastructure, Oracle Corp. announced on Wednesday the availability of its Application Server 10g.
“This is now a complete solution for data application and process level integration,” said Vijay Tella, chief strategy officer, application server at Oracle. He added that the advances in the integration of the platform help customers solve any problems they might have with fragmented application data and systems environments.
Oracle is calling this major upgrade the first middleware application server for grid computing.
“The core focus for Oracle is making all these capabilties available at a low cost and deployable on low-cost commodity computing grids,” Tella said.
“We’ve made a lot of advances with respect to how to be able to manage centrally and provision and deploy servers very easily; (to) be able to secure users; and (to) be able to provide an end-to-end security infrastructure for access control, authorization, authentication and privacy.”
Together with the entire 10g product family, the new software rounds out high availability in grid enviornments and new features make it easier for customers to install, configure, clone and deploy software and maintian software centrally, Tella explained.
Tella said the application server has been in beta for nine months. The newest version is also Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) compliant and has wireless capabilities and enterprise portal software.
The company also announced the availability of a preview version of Oracle JDeveloper 10g, giving developers early access to the upcoming release of the product, Oracle said.
Featuring Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), Tella explained that JDeveloper simplifies application development by providing a producitivity layer, enabling developers to create J2EE applications and Web services optimized for deployment on enterprise grids.
The preview version of JDeveloper is free and can be found on the Oracle developer community Web site. It is scheduled to be available in 2004.
The Oracle Application Server 10g is now available for purchase or can be downloaded for free under a development license from Oracle Technology Network. The Server is being released in three editions: a Java Edition for $6,517 per processor or on a per user basis for $130 per named user; The Standard Edition is selling for $13,033 per processor or $261 per named user; and there is the $26,066 per processor for the Enterprise Edition which can also be purchased for $521 per named user.
Initial versions of the product are for Linux and Unix; a Windows version will follow. The next major release from Oracle will be the 10g database.
