Oracle Web Applications: PL/SQL Developer's Intro

Database Integration

The HTTP listener and PL/SQL gateway are used to build web-enabled systems that provide tight integration with a backend Oracle database. PL/SQL-based OAS and WebDB applications are developed using a set of packages called the PL/SQL toolkit. In this section, we’ll take a quick look at the toolkit and see an example procedure. The last section covers how to pass parameters.

The PL/SQL Toolkit

WebDB and OAS both include the PL/SQL toolkit. The toolkit contains a variety of PL/SQL packages written and supplied by Oracle that perform a range of tasks, including generating HTML tags, manipulating cookies (name/value pairs used to save information throughout an entire session), and creating complex HTML structures based on information in a database table. In general, procedures built with the toolkit will work in either product, although you may run into minor database privilege issues that the DBA can help you resolve.

The packages in the toolkit (described in detail in Chapter 7) are:

HTP and HTF

HTP is a set of procedures that print syntactically correct HTML tags, which are returned to the user’s web browser. HTF is an equivalent set of functions that return HTML strings whose output is returned to the program that called the function. In either package, procedures and functions correspond to specific HTML tags; their parameters correspond to tag attributes.

OWA_COOKIE

A set of data structures, procedures, and functions used to create and manipulate cookies. ...