Yesterday Oracle released Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, a SOA stack including WebLogic, BPEL, Rules, Metadata support, Oracle ADF, and improved declarative programming support in the new release of JDeveloper. If you google it, you’ll find plenty of blogs describing all the details of this new release.
One thing that surprised me is that Oracle now also has Application Lifecycle Management tooling including a server part and JDeveloper support. Oracle’s ALM tool is called Oracle Team Productivity Center. What sets it apart from alternatives like Eclipse Jazz/Rational Team Concert and Microsoft’s team system is Oracle’s support for different backend stores. You can use Jira for bugs/todo’s or you can use Rally Software ALM tooling, designed for Agile projects.
I think it’s a good thing that Oracle have finally released ALM tooling. In the past we’ve build our own ALM servers, mainly from opensource components like subversion, trac, and continuum. The fact that Oracle has released an ALM tool stresses the importance of good ALM facilities. Often, no budget at all was available on projects, so we mostly used free opensource solutions that we had to quickly throw together, as there was also limited time to install it.