Oracle Starts to Embrace App Servers

It may take some getting used to, but Oracle has announced how it plans to support the adoption of one of its technologies on platforms it doesn’t own.

The company today announced Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Essentials, a free version of ADF that will be made available on open source GlassFish application servers in addition to Oracle WebLogic. Bill Pataky, Oracle vice president of product management, says Oracle also plans to add support for the Java development framework on other application server platforms, but as of yet is not ready to identify which ones.

Pataky says Oracle is trying to promote greater adoption of an approach to building applications using a declarative model that is not only more efficient, but also makes it easier to replicate changes across a series of applications built using a common framework. A declarative approach, says Pataky, makes ADF accessible to business users, while the ability to replicate changes across multiple applications provides organizations with an iterative ability in terms of developing those applications.

ADF is the second recent cross-platform offering from Oracle. The company last month unveiled an upgrade to its GoldenGate data integration software that added support for multiple databases. While it’s too early to cite this as a definitive trend, it would seem to indicate that Oracle is slowly moving towards a more open approach to enterprise computing that goes well beyond simply letting people choose what physical server they want to run Oracle software.

Of course, Oracle would obviously prefer that server to be one of its own. But as a practical matter, Oracle seems to be recognizing that there might be a much greater opportunity for at least some of its software that goes well beyond offerings such as its WebLogic application server of even core database technologies.