ORACLE THIS WEEK is releasing an updated version of the TopLink Java development tool it recently acquired from WebGain, along with a road map pledging continued TopLink support for competitors' databases and application servers.

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The new version, called Oracle9i Application Server TopLink 9.0.3, features support for Oracle9i AS connection-pooling technology, which enables multiple connections to a server. It is the first release of the product since Oracle acquired the technology and is now built in to Oracle9i AS.

Also featured are performance optimizations and support for Service Pack 1 of the BEA WebLogic Server application server.

The Oracle road map for TopLink includes continued support for third-party application servers, including BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere, and databases such as IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server as well as those from Sybase and Informix. Oracle's road map answers the question about whether or not the company would continue support for third-party products with TopLink following the June acquisition, according to John Magee, vice president of Oracle9i product marketing, in Redwood Shores, Calif.

However, Oracle9i AS users get the new version of TopLink free while users of the other vendors' products must pay $7,000 per processor. A trial version is available for free, with fees charged once developers build a production application.

TopLink is described by Oracle as a persistence framework featuring a toolset and code to make it easier to build Java applications to function with relational databases. The tool makes applications run faster as well as cutting time needed to develop them, Magee said.

Future enhancements include adding support for direct access to data sources besides relational databases, including Web services and XML documents and files. "What we're seeing is Web services are an increasingly important source of information as more and more data is exposed as Web services," Magee said.

The TopLink framework will evolve to enable aggregation of data from multiple relational and non-relational information sources into a common object model. Services will be provided such as XML caching, XML query, and data transformation, Oracle said.

The new tool is available now.

Other major benefits of the new version of TopLink, according to Oracle, include enhanced performance with caching technology that minimizes database and network traffic while leveraging JDBC databases and resource optimizations to allow development teams to streamline the development process and focus on building the application, not the infrastructure.