Oracle boasts about sales, development numbers

An Oracle official at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference gave a glimpse Tuesday into the volume of technologies coming out of the company. The company this week also detailed a host of software development related product plans.

In a keynote presentation at the conference, Oracle's Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of product development, provided insight into product efforts in a presentation featuring multiple Oracle software technologies deployed for uses such as e-commerce.

"My development organisation this year shipped 3,000 software products, 190 of them new," Kurian said. There were 50 major releases, more than 17,540 new features and 80 million hours spent on quality assurance, he said.

"Every second of every working day, somebody was downloading one of our products from the Oracle Technology Network," Kurian said.

Oracle technologies were noted in the presentation, such as the Oracle ADF (Application Framework) metaframework for Java, Siebel applications, Oracle Fusion process management, and Oracle business intelligence. Other technologies covered included the Oracle WebLogic Server environment, Coherence data grid technology, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Database 11g Active Data Guard, for data replication.

Kurian emphasised integration across Oracle product lines. "It's the combination of these products and the integration that we have done across them that make the world's leading industries, companies in virtually every industry, choose to run their business on Oracle products," he said.

Separately from Kurian's presentation, Oracle cited product plans in the developer space. A planned release of the Oracle JDeveloper 11g Java IDE is eyed, with such features as added support for Maven, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation Language), Facelets, Unified Modeling Language 2.0 and Eclipse key mappings.

A planned release of ADF will add the Carousel UI component for displaying collections of data, an auto suggest capability for enhanced search, and a Spark chart type.

Oracle WebCenter Suite, for building composite applications and portals, will be fitted with the ability to embed communities, team sites, and "Enterprise 2.0" services like tagging, linking, discussions, and presence into ADF applications.

Oracle WebLogic Suite, which provides enterprise software infrastructure, will add Oracle TopLink Grid capabilities. Oracle is previewing Oracle WebLogic Server SCA (Service Component Architecture), enabling developers to use plain Java classes for business logic and assemble them into SOA composites for deployment to WebLogic Server.

A release of Oracle SOA Suite is planned featuring Monitor Express Dashboards for generating business activity monitoring dashboards for composite applications, from within JDeveloper.

Oracle also announced at the conference this week an update to Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g, featuring a deployment descriptor editor for visual editing of Enterprise JavaBeans for deployment on the WebLogic Server application server.

The company also said it has donated support for its Library Provider Framework, for library inclusion via Eclipse plugins, to the EclipseLink and Kodo projects. Oracle also has introduced samplecode.oracle.com, a code sharing community for developers and users of Oracle technologies. It features a repository for sample application source code, code snippets, templates and skins.