The announcement is being made at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Available in early 2006, Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 is being classified by Oracle as a major update to its SOA platform. A key addition is a business rules engine to ease the changing of processes.

"What this allows customers to do is to declaratively set business rules," said Rick Schultz, vice president at Oracle Fusion middleware. "They can add or modify business rules without having to go into their application code and make changes in the application, which would require them to recompile and redeploy the whole application."

Oracle is providing value with the rules engine, said analyst John Rymer, vice president of application development and infrastructure at Forrester Research. "Business logic changes all the time. This is what our clients are struggling with now," Rymer said.

Rymer cited as an example banks that have to change processes after credit card companies issue policy revisions. "It's just a huge amount of work," Rymer said.