The general release of Oracle SOA Suite is priced at US$50,000 per CPU when used with Oracle's application server, and $65,000 per CPU for use with other application servers.

Oracle officials this week also noted other developments:

-- An AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) render kit is being developed to make it easier to use AJAX programming with Oracle Application Server. "Developer costs and training has been a big pain point for our customers," said Ted Farrell, Oracle chief architect and vice president for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Tools. Farrell, however, is not necessarily sold on the push for more scripting languages. "To me, we don't need more languages. What we need to do is be smarter with what we have," Farrell said.

-- Oracle officials place the company's annual middleware revenues at about $1 billion, roughly equal to rival middleware vendor BEA.

-- Oracle has coined an acronym, OPAL, for Oracle, PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), Apache and Linux, to describe Oracle's equivalent to the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) stack.