Oracle VP for Fusion Middleware just laid out Oracle's most detailed vision yet of how the SOA lifecycle should work -- from simplified, declarative development via standards-based (JSF, EJB3) frameworks, to standards-based (BPEL) service integration/orchestration, to runtime management and security (via Oracle Web Services Manager et al), to post-deployment changes (via Oracle BAM). The SOA stack is starting to make some sense for the real world.
Thomas also made (or echoed) some very interesting announcements regarding Oracle's participation in the Eclipse Foundation (in efforts to lead JSF and EJB3 tooling projects), as well as the fact that Oracle's EJB3 implementation (derived from TopLink) will become the Sun Java Standard Reference Implementation for object/relational persistence. Wow!
I encourage you to view the replay of Thomas' keynote. But for now, I have to share a taste of the new Oracle BAM UI (forgive the poor quality, but best I could do):
