Oracle announced the introduction of the "Hot-Pluggable" capabilities of its Oracle Fusion Middleware product family. These "Hot-Pluggable" capabilities highlight the ability of its middleware platform to tightly integrate with other (non-Oracle) middleware products and databases as well as to provide tight integration across heterogeneous business applications, Oracle says.

Built for the heterogeneous enterprise, Oracle Fusion Middleware consists of modular component software that run on a range of popular platforms and interoperate with middleware technologies and business applications from other software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP.

"By delivering on an architecture that is Hot-Pluggable, Oracle enables customers to utilize Oracle Fusion Middleware's broad capabilities without having to replace their existing middleware and infrastructure technologies such as J2EE application servers, directory servers, and system management tools," said Tod Nielsen, senior vice president, Oracle. "We embrace and rapidly adopt key SOA standards but also go beyond that with our rigorous certification of third party product interoperability. The message to customers is, don't get locked in. You should require your middleware components to be modular and interoperable across a heterogeneous enterprise IT environment."

Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3's Hot-Pluggable architecture will enable organizations to mix and match Oracle's best-in-class middleware components with their existing infrastructures and use components of Oracle Fusion Middleware together with open source development tools and runtimes (see related news release Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3). This unique architecture will allow users to connect and extend their existing heterogeneous systems and maximize current and future investments in IT.

Open Source technologies supported in this release include Apache Struts, the Spring framework, JUnit, CVS, Apache MyFaces and more. Additionally, this release adds support for the latest Java standards such as Java Server Faces, EJB 3.0 and Java Business Integration; it also adds support for the latest Web Services and security standards including WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Federation, SAML 2.0 and UDDI v3.

Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 is scheduled to be generally available by the end of fiscal year 2006 and will be certified to interoperate with more than 128 products including Microsoft .NET; IBM WebSphere; IBM MQ-Series; Cisco Local Director; F5 Big IP; third party Checkpoint firewalls; third party Content Management software; and popular Systems Management tools.