By justin.kestelyn on December 31, 2007 11:48 AM
If you were at Oracle OpenWorld you may have heard tell of Thomas Kurian's professed "Christmas present for developers," which he and other development VPs referred to obliquely. Literally minutes before I took leave for holiday last week, this present was delivered in the form of new Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Technology Previews, including:
- Oracle JDeveloper 11g Tech Preview 3, the first release to include design time support for Oracle WebCenter as well as SOA - in fact, JDeveloper and SOA Suite have now been integrated, thereby permitting test runs of SOA apps (by virtue of an included OC4J install) directly from the design-time
environment. (See Release Notes.)
- OC4J 11g Tech Preview, which includes all the
containers, APIs, and services mandated by the Java EE 5.0 spec and has enhanced support for the Spring Framework. (See Release Notes.)
- Oracle TopLink 11g Tech Preview 3, now fully compliant with the JPA spec (which is in turn part of the Java EE 5 EJB 3.0 spec) (see Release Notes).
Download away - this is really good news as we've all been on pins and needles for this stuff.
By justin.kestelyn on December 31, 2007 12:30 PM
As an end-of-year tidbit, let me also include a piece of news that I nearly missed last week:
Leading Research Firm Recognizes Oracle as Leader in Worldwide Embedded Database Management System Vendor Share (download report excerpt here)
Oracle, the king of the relational database, now the embedded database leader as well? In my view this is something of a sea change signaled by the SleepyCat and TimesTen acquisitions, I'm not 100% sure this market was taken extremely seriously by Oracle previously (Oracle Lite notwithstanding). IBM, of course, fired the first shot in this skirmish with its acquisition of Cloudscape some years ago (which has since disappeared from the map; witness IBM's solidDB acquisition of some weeks ago. IBM also now owns Bruce Scott's PointBase by virtue of its acquisition of DataMirror.)
As an insider I can confirm that Berkeley DB is ubiquitous to an ungodly degree; it can be found in places that would surprise many people. Apparently Oracle made the right choice.
I spoke with Oracle's embedded development VP Mike Olson via podcast recently; it's a good source of further info in this area. My podcast with BDB architect Margo Seltzer is a good listen too; between those two old UC Berkeley Comp Sci department hands, I learned a lot.
