Oracle launches Fusion Middleware 11g

Oracle has launched Fusion Middleware 11g to UK and US customers and will bring the product to Australia mid next week.

The updated platform is being marketed by the firm as the first complete middleware solution on the market.

Oracle president Charles Phillips said the IT industry had never really defined the middleware category.

“Companies tend to specialise in different middleware components, like business intelligence or data management and most of these components are proprietary,” he said.

“We said these components are all related in our mind and so middleware should be a related suite of products that supports applications. It is the level where application standards are defined, such as how applications are deployed or their security processes."

The new Fusion release contains integration with products elsewhere in Oracle’s portfolio, such as the Oracle SOA Suite, WebLogic Suite, WebCenter Suite and Identity Management software.

A new set of developer tools are part of the WebLogic Suite update, which is aimed at allowing enterprises to deploy reliable applications more quickly and at a lower cost.

“We are providing developers with all the features they need to build applications in a single environment to enhance their productivity,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle Fusion Middleware senior vice president.

Customers have a choice between the JDeveloper Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which allows them to build applications across application servers, or the Eclipse IDE, which allows them to integrate with open-source products.

Other new features include Fusion Middleware Gridlink for Oracle Real Application Clusters that optimises integration between database clustering and application server clustering to enable improved performance in clustered architectures at a low cost.

Businesses wanting to upgrade to WebLogic Suite 11g from Oracle Application Server 10g can use the Fusion Middleware Upgrade Tool for Java EE.

Furthermore, the availability of SOA Suite 11g in Fusion will simplify application development because of its modular infrastructure, Oracle said.

New capabilities in the updated SOA Suite include Native SCA Designer, which contains drag-and-drop features and holds a composite application blueprint; and the integration of what Oracle calls an Event Driven Network to enable the development of applications that respond to events in real time.

New collaboration features have also been added to Fusion Middleware though the integration of WebCenter Suite 11g.

The suite has been extended with WebCenter Spaces, which enables business users to create ad hoc web-based communities while remaining in a Microsoft Office environment; and WebCenter Services, which allows users to integrate tagging, linking and RSS feeds with their enterprise applications.

Additionally Oracle Composer will allow users to customise portals and composite applications with social computing services.

Finally, the next edition of Identity Management 11g has new features Fusion users will have access to, such as Deployment Accelerators and a modern unified user interface.

Kurian explained how the “now full suite of products” would work together.

“Customers can build applications on 11g using our enhanced developer tools and then use the SOA foundation to ensure components are consistent with each other,” he said.

“The applications can be deployed in a cloud style environment and highly secured with the identity management capabilities."

Phillips explained the aim of the release was to make it easier for customers to tamper with applications sitting on top of the middleware, or the underlying infrastructure, without the changes affecting each other.

“What we’re trying to do is change the way people think of enterprise computing. The key issue we’re trying to solve is the complexity issues and all the dependencies between different levels of the architecture,” said Phillips.