Today’s general session was presented by Oracle. John Gage of SUN Microsystems introduced Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, Oracle.

Kurian talked about four emerging trends in application development: Service-Oriented Development, Business Process Orchestration, Rich Enterprise 2.0 Architecture, and Grid Computing Architecture

Service-oriented development must involve a standards-based tool set, with an integrated development environment that includes modeling, page flow, a development framework, rich user interface design, and business logic.

He showed a JDeveloper demonstration that showcased how JDeveloper contains all of the components required to build rich web applications. He announce a new product the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse that provides JDeveloper functionality for the Eclipse platform. The Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse will be free.

The Enterprise 2.0 architecture involves an open content server, open web publishing, RSS tagging and linking, mashups and WIKIs, and social networks and communities. Kurian expanded on the first demo showing how JDeveloper could integrate social computing components (e-mail, document sharing, instant messaging) easily into the existing application.

Business Process Orchestration is built on a Service Component Architecture (SCA) foundation using a service bus, service orchestration, business process modeling, complex event processing and activity monitoring, policy management, and an SOA repository. Again the demo was expanded using JDeveloper to easily add new business processes into an existing process flow.

The grid computing architecture involves a Java VM, virtualization, application servers, application provisioning, in-memory grid, and systems management. The demo was expanded again to use the JRockit VM from BEA and visualized with the BEA Platform Manager. He showed how the JRockit VM optimized garbage collection and automatically tuned itself to handle different loads.

More information can be found on the Oracle Developer Network.