Oracle is saying that 2005 represented "a breakthrough year for Oracle Fusion Middleware," which the company is developing with the goals of  simplifying application development, deployment, integration and management. In a long webcast focused on Fusion, company President Charles Phillips (pictured) outlined the company's vision and progress behind this project.

The year included a number of distinctive "firsts," Philiips said, including: first to market with an integrated, standards-based Application Platform Suite (APS), first APS designed for Grid, first APS to support comprehensive Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-driven Architecture (EDA), and first APS to integrate Enterprise Security, Identity Management and Business Intelligence.

As far as nuts and bolts, Oracle says that advances in J2EE, Application Frameworks, SOA Tools, Web Services Management, Business Rules, BPEL Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Business Analytics, and Identity Provisioning, Identity Management and Federation were all achieved over the past year.

"Customers, partners, industry analysts and leading technology publications recognize Oracle Fusion Middleware's best-in-class technologies, support of industry standards and its unique "hot-pluggable" architecture," the company said in an official announcement that followed the webcast. "Today, customers and partners use Oracle Fusion Middleware's 'hot-pluggable' capabilities to deploy components of the suite on a range of popular operating systems and to interoperate with middleware technologies and business applications from software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP."

During 2005, Oracle says it "also further tightened" the integration between Oracle Fusion Middleware and many popular Open Source technologies, including ANT, AXIS, CVS, Eclipse, Hibernate, myFaces, PERL, PHP, Spring, Struts, SubVersion and Tomcat.