Oracle and Open Source

Connecting to Oracle

Only you can decide which of the three scripted solutions is best for your particular application, platform, and personal preference in programming. You can be assured that all three of them will provide you with an attractive GUI toolkit. What’s also crucial for this book is that they also provide an excellent interface to the Oracle database, as we describe next.

Tcl/Tk and Oratcl

This is the best established and most widely known scripting combination for use with Oracle. Tcl currently has one big nontechnical advantage as a scripting solution for Oracle applications, and that is its corporate acceptance. John Ousterhout’s Tcl development work with Sun Microsystems between 1994 and 1998,^[22] in combination with Oracle Corporation’s adoption of the Oratcl interface program in its own Oracle Enterprise Manager product, gives Tcl a certain blue-chip respectability. Tcl has also won acceptance in the commercial world because of the presence of its Tcl/Tk web plug-ins that are ready to run out of the box, as well as a number of other useful add-ons.

Perl/Tk, Perl DBI, and DBD::Oracle

Perl/Tk, in conjunction with its database interface module, Perl DBI, provides you with everything you need to create effective GUI solutions for Oracle-based applications. Perl DBI cleanly wraps up OCI via its DBD::Oracle driver module, and Perl/Tk wraps up the Tk GUI widgets. Some major advantages for Perl as a scripting solution for Oracle applications are the rapidly expanding ...