After talking up its Dynamic Services Framework at the end of last
year, Oracle has kept its Web services strategy quiet, making only
a few announcements relating to standards support.
But with yesterday's posting of a pre-release version of its
JDeveloper tool kit for 9i on the Internet, the company has offered
some insight into its plans for Web services.
The database giant plans to impart the same "integrated everything"
approach that it applies to all its products, from databases to
enterprise applications, according to John Magee, senior director
of 9i product marketing.
"Oracle has not hyped Web services to the extent that Microsoft
has. But we view it as an evolutionary necessity for using the
Internet for business," Magee continued.
Within Oracle's integrated approach, which includes the database,
application server and applications, it sells an infrastructure for
Web services akin to that of Microsoft. On the Java side, its
approach is similar to that of IBM, BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard
and Sun Microsystems.
Peter Urban, an analyst at AMR Research, said the JDeveloper tools
are the beginning of Oracle's Web services push. "They have been
moving to become more of an infrastructure player for a while now,"
he said.
While the company has been flexing its marketing muscles towards
Web services and has been a general infrastructure player for
years, Urban continued, IBM is taking a similar route by closely
aligning its Tivoli software, MQSeries, DB2 and WebSphere.
There are advantages to the integrated approaches, said Kathy
Quirk, an analyst at Hurwitz Group. "If you're trying to get your
customers to move to a new wave of development, you don't want them
to have to throw away what they already have," she said.
Quirke added, however, that the vendors collectively need to
address more than just building new applications for Web Services.
"There are a lot of unknowns here. Everyone's talking about how to
build new applications, but not about how to transition existing
applications into Web services," Quirk said.
Earlier this week, SilverStream Software unveiled a new iteration
of its application server with support built into the core for Web
services standards Extensible Markup Language, Simple Object Access
Protocol, Web Services Description Language, and Universal
Description, Discovery and Integration. Last Week, BEA Systems
shipped WebLogic 6.1, a version of its application server that
includes support for the same standards.
Additionally this week, Cape Clear extended the reach of its
CapeConnect Web services platform to iPlanet's application server.
Prior to that, it worked with servers from BEA and IBM.
Oracle plans to release the final version of its JDeveloper tool
for 9i by the end of the year.