For more than 15 years, Oracle® Corporation has been one of the world’s leading technology companies. Much of the company’s reputation is built on its enterprise database product—the leading database for online transaction processing and enterprise applications for more than a decade. In recent years, however, Oracle has enhanced its product offerings to encompass a complete technology stack, including the E-Business Suite (providing applications), the Collaboration Suite (providing communication throughout an organization), and Oracle Application Server, which is the focus of this book.
Oracle Application Server is a middle-tier application platform suite offering a variety of capabilities. Although Oracle Application Server has grown in popularity and functionality in recent years, there has been a dearth of third-party books about the product. Our goal is to remedy this situation.
Tip
In this book, we use the term Oracle Application Server to refer mainly to Oracle Application Server 10g, the latest release of Oracle’s product. Where necessary, we also describe features in the previous product releases, particularly in Oracle9i Application Server. Many features are identical across versions. Note, however, that because some readers may be using older releases, when we describe a new feature that was first made available in a particular release, we indicate that fact to help avoid confusion.
Five years ago, two of us were the principal coauthors of Oracle Essentials, a new kind of book that attempted to describe all the underlying principles that shape the Oracle database, one written concisely for an intelligent audience. Oracle Essentials was not a large book—there were fewer than 350 pages in that first edition (we have since written two more editions)—but it covered a lot of ground. It did not attempt to describe detailed syntax; instead, it focused on broad architectural concepts and important features.
The more we thought about it, the more we realized that Oracle Application Server was, in some ways, even more in need of this type of treatment. Oracle Application Server contains many different types of functionality, from its basic web server features to its support of business intelligence. Many people who consider using the product are familiar with only a portion of the entire range of capabilities or are overwhelmed by the choices provided. Few people have a grasp of how larger issues, such as the interplay between components or the various architectural choices for deploying Oracle Application Server.
Hence this book. The goals of Oracle Application Server 10g Essentials, summarized in the next section, are similar to the goals we tried to achieve in our earlier book that many people have found very helpful. We hope we have met our objectives for this book as well.
Our main goal is to give you a foundation for understanding and using Oracle Application Server effectively and efficiently. Therefore, we wrote with these principles in mind:
- Focus
We’ve tried to concentrate on the most important Oracle Application Server issues and components. Each chapter aims to provide a comprehensive but concise discussion of how Oracle handles an area and the repercussions of that treatment.
- Brevity
One of the first decisions we made was to concentrate on principles rather than syntax and to keep the book short and well-focused on underlying concepts. Including myriad syntax diagrams and examples would defeat this purpose. Moreover, such material is readily available in the product documentation.
- Acceleration
We’ve tried to make this an ideal first Oracle Application Server book for a wide spectrum of Oracle users—but not the last! You will very likely have to refer to Oracle documentation or other, more specific books for more details about using Oracle Application Server and its components. However, we hope this book will act as an accelerator for you. With this book’s solid foundation, you will be able to take detailed information from other sources and put it to the best use.
Among us, the authors have more than 40 years of experience with Oracle. We’ve tried to apply that experience here as best we can.
We wrote this book for people at all levels of Oracle expertise, as well as for those with varying degrees of familiarity with the different areas of capabilities within Oracle Application Server. There are many types of readers:
Those concerned with using and managing web servers
Those who do Java© development and deployment
Those who use Oracle’s own tools, such as Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports
Those who use and develop for Oracle Application Server Portal
Those who use and administer business intelligence, mobile, or integration software
And these are only a few of the “typical” Oracle Application Server users.
Chances are that some of the items in this brief list apply to you, and some don’t. However, because Oracle Application Server comes with all this functionality, we believe you can use the product more effectively if you have background that helps you understand the varied capabilities of Oracle Application Server.
Our guiding principle has been to present this information compactly without making it overly tutorial. We figure that the most important ratio in a book such as this is the amount of useful information you get balanced against the time it takes you to get it. We sincerely hope this volume provides a terrific bang for the buck.
This book is divided into 15 chapters and 1 appendix, as follows.
Chapter 1, describes the range of Oracle Application Server capabilities and some of the options for purchase and installation.
Chapter 2, describe the basic architecture of Oracle Application Server and optional deployment architectures used to provide scalability and availability. This chapter provides the core technical information needed to effectively use the product.
Chapter 3, provides a brief overview of the processes and tools used to manage the complete Oracle Application Server environment.
Chapter 4, looks at how Oracle Application Server provides security and identity management services that can be used for all the components that make up the Oracle Application Server environment.
Chapter 5, is the first chapter in a series of chapters examining specific components of Oracle Application Server. The Oracle HTTP Server is the core of the Oracle Application Server environment.
Chapter 6, covers the OC4J container that runs Java applications. Oracle Application Server, in its most basic state, is used as a Java deployment platform, and OC4J is the target of these deployments.
Chapter 7, looks at the three caches used in Oracle Application Server—the Oracle Application Server Web Cache, which is used for all types of content, and the Java Object Cache and Web Object Cache, which are used with OC4J. Use of these caches can significantly accelerate the performance of Oracle Application Server.
Chapter 8, covers Java development and deployment with Oracle Application Server.
Chapter 9, looks at three Oracle-specific development technologies—PL/SQL, Oracle Application Server Forms Service, and Oracle Application Server Reports Services—and describes how they are used and deployed with Oracle Application Server.
Chapter 10, describes the use of Oracle Application Server with XML.
Chapter 11, explores the use of the Web Services technology with Oracle Application Server and its component development options.
Chapter 12, looks at the issues facing business intelligence users and the ways in which Oracle Application Server Portal, Oracle Reports, and Discoverer address these issues. The chapter also touches on data mining and management of the business intelligence components in Oracle Application Server.
Chapter 13, covers the OracleAS Portal product and its range of capabilities.
Chapter 14, describes the use of Oracle Application Server as a platform for mobile computing.
Chapter 15, describes the integration software that is included with some editions of Oracle Application Server.
The Appendix, lists a variety of additional resources—both online and offline—you can use to learn more about the topics presented in this book.
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