Oracle WebCenter Suite : A new way of application development

Yesterday the design environment (JDev) for WebCenter Suite was released. After the demo by Thomas Kurian at OOW2006 I was very curious about this new product.
The WebCenter Suite is the first result of the Fusion stack: The Oracle Fusion developers needed it to build the Fusion apps. But now we can use it too!
The WebCenter Framework (the runtime environment) will be available any day now. Using the Framework you can use out-of-the-box WebCenter Services, like Content Management, Search, Presense Server, Instant Messaging, Wiki and Forums.

WebCenter supports building applications by putting small blocks of UI together. So after modular development in PL/SQL (what every developer should do), and modular development of services - using SOA - we can now develop modular UI blocks and put these all together to build a even more user friendly process driven work environment for the end-user.

I hope I can spend some time in the near future to try out this new product.

The development team is already working on R11, which will include WebCenter Composer (to dynamically create and change the UI by the user - just like Portal) and WebCenter Shell, which will support (o.a.) Communities.

Oh yeah, the license costs about $80k/cpu...

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