Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian during a JavaOne presentation on Tuesday evening outlined Oracle"s vision and solutions for building and maintaining service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

The company"s "new application blueprint" features JavaServer Faces (JSF) for the user interface, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) for business processes, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 for developing business logic. The plan also involves tying into legacy systems and applications through the Web Services Invocation Framework and Java Business Integration specifications, Kurian said. A common set of tooling to develop applications and change them is also featured.

"This [blueprint] allows you to build great, sophisticated applications. We call that dynamic service-oriented architecture and our Oracle Fusion middleware platform has all the technologies that we showed you today [for SOA]," Kurian said.

Kurian displayed a slide depicting an application stack that had BPEL residing above an enterprise service bus and an application server, with the Web Services Security specification furnishing secure business processes.

JSF and EJB 3.0, for object persistence, are critical cogs in Oracle"s battle plan.

"EJB 3.0 holds enormous promise and we believe drastically simplifies and makes EJBs accessible to every Java developer," Kurian said.

"JSF gives you a component model for a user interface. You can declaratively build a page," and tie pages into page flows and render them interactively into a client without browser plug-ins," Kurian said.

An audience member expressed interest in JSF after the presentation.

"I guess I was really impressed with the presentation, [which showed] how you create rich interfaces with [Oracle] JDeveloper and JSF," said Igor Stelmashenko, a software architect with Credit Union Central of British Columbia, in Vancouver, B.C.

While not using JSF now, Stelmashenko said he plans to. Currently, he uses JavaServer Pages servlets, Struts, and tag libraries. His organization uses some elements of SOA, deploying Web services to communicate with clients, Stelmashenko said.

Oracle on Wednesday is announcing that it will join Sun Microsystems as a co-specification lead for EJB 3.0. Oracle also will provide persistence technology in the Reference Implementation for Java Enterprise Edition 5.0, the company said. An implementation for the new Java Persistence API will be furnished to make Java development easier, Oracle said.

The reference implementation will be derived from the Oracle TopLink Java object-to-relational tool and deployment platform.

Additionally, Oracle will contribute components of the reference implementation to Sun"s Project GlassFish, which is an open source implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition 5.0 Software Developer"s Kit.

Oracle also is proposing to lead a tooling project for BPEL within the Eclipse Foundation open source organization.

Oracle will help build an open source BPEL tool under the Eclipse Public License. The tool will be based on technology in the Oracle BPEL Process Manager and BPEL Designer tools.