Oracle has ensured that the legacy applications built on platforms like Forms & Reports, are continued to be supported even in the face of changing paradigms from client-server to web based applications. Oracle Application Server 10g allows developers to quickly build and deploy web based applications that use oracle development technologies.
Prashant Belwariar Informatics Regional Editor prashant.b@nic.in
In this book, the authors Ostrowski and Brown introduce the various development environments supported by Oracle Application Server 10g and describe its benefits and features to the readers. According to the authors, organisations can move to a web based model without losing the time and effort already invested in Forms, Reports or Discoverer development. As the needs grow, it is possible to augment the development efforts with PL/SQL Server Pages (PSPs) or a tool such as JDeveloper to implement technologies like JavaServer Pages (JSPs), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), Struts or Java applets.
Title - Oracle Application Server 10g Web development Author - Christopher Ostrowski & Bradley D. Brown Publisher - Oracle Press (Tata McGraw- Hill Edition -2005)
This book is divided into four parts encompassing Overview of the Technologies, Oracle Tools, Oracle Portal and Java in Oracle respectively. Oracle technologies for these demands include: OC4J – Oracle's Application Server Containers for J2EE, providing developers with a robust, secure and scalable Java environments. Oracle Identity Management - provides an easy way of maintaining various levels of security for applications in a secure, centralised location. Oracle Process Manager – for maintaining applications deployed to OC4J instances and restart those process automatically in the event of an unexpected termination.
Oracle Tools – “Oracle Forms 10g” is a part of the RAD environment, integrates with oracle database seamlessly but no longer supports client server deployment. All forms are run on the web via a browser. “Oracle Reports 10g” allow the creation of complex reports satisfying the reporting needs within an organisation. The authors claim that It provides the developer with an environment to publish “any data in any format, anywhere”.
“OracleAS Discoverer 10g” is an end user ad hoc query, reporting, analysis and web publishing tool. It gives end users the ability to define and run complex reports with advanced features such as graphing, data pivoting, drill-downs, parameters and correlated sub-queries all without requiring the end user to have advanced knowledge of SQL.
The authors have discussed the issues and methods for deploying and running applications over the web in great detail. The necessary features in the PL/SQL web Toolkit needed for developing web applications have been elaborated nicely.
Oracle Portal – “OracleAS Portal” is an environment that allows developers to create and test sophisticated applications with a very small amount of code. The wizards can generate web applications consisting of forms, reports and graphs and deploy those OracleAS components quickly and easily. The basic as well as advanced OracleAS Portal components have been examined in detail by Ostrowski & Brown. A separate chapter has been devoted for integrating Forms, Reports and Discoverer into Portal.
Java in Oracle – Oracle JDeveloper 10g contains all the expected capabilities of a top of the line Java IDE. Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) has been introduced with its relevance to JDeveloper.
The concluding portion describes Web Services as Oracle has identified it as a key technology. Creating and developing Web Services using Oracle JDeveloper 10g have been adequately dealt with.
The authors have extensively used screen shots wherever required. To conclude, this book nicely bundles various Oracle development technologies but does not discuss the administration tasks associated with Oracle Application Server 10g for which the Oracle Press has brought out a separate book.