Oracle Application Server 4.0: The Integration Platform for Oracle Products and the Internet An Oracle White Paper August 1998
The Integration Platform for Oracle Products and the Internet INTRODUCTION Since the June 1997 introduction of Oracle s award winning Application Server, numerous other vendors have jumped into the market with announcements regarding new application server product offerings. While many vendors now claim to be committed to providing solutions in this space, no vendor is making a larger commitment than Oracle. This paper intends to describe and illustrate the level of commitment and ongoing investment that Oracle has made, and continues to make, to Oracle Application Server (OAS) V4.0 and beyond. In addition, this paper sketches a roadmap for other Oracle products adding OAS, together with Oracle8, to their server based application infrastructure. Indeed almost every product coming out of Oracle is leveraging OAS 4.0 to provide a unified application infrastructure across major IT problem areas such as thin-client Back-Office deployment, Data Warehousing, E- Commerce and enabling Front-Office applications. Another major challenge is the integration of legacy applications to the Internet. Application development is an area where Oracle tools are providing enhanced support. To wit, Oracle JDeveloper provides unique support for developing Java applications on both the middle (application) and data (database) tiers. Oracle s customers get several benefits from this integrated approach. First, they get a Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that is specifically designed for developing, de-bugging and deploying applications that are server based. Second, JDeveloper takes a comprehensive approach to server development by providing strong support for both the mid and data tiers of today s complex Internet applications. Additionally, JDeveloper supports both HTTP and IIOP types of Java applications (JWeb and JCORBA Cartridge models) from a single IDE. Last but not the least, since Oracle adheres to open standards, customers can confidently expect OAS based solutions to interoperate with existing homegrown and 3 rd party systems and advance to the brave new world of web and component-based application model at their own pace. In the systems management area, OAS4.0 now uses Oracle s Enterprise Manager (OEM) management console to provide common setup, configuration and management functions, thus providing the consistent experience Oracle customers are accustomed to with the database. In addition, OEM uses OAS as its distributed platform for managing distributed nodes, and OEM access via a 100% pure Java Browser interface. This integration should provide system and database administrators with immediate benefits in both ease of use and re-use of existing skills. In the following section are some specific examples of product integration with OAS, followed by an overview of upcoming Oracle products and how they are utilizing OAS to provide improved services to customers. DEVELOPING ON OAS: ORACLE TOOLS SUPPORT Oracle has three major tools (and more are in the pipeline) to enable application development on Oracle Application Server 4.0: 1
Oracle Designer Oracle Developer Oracle JDeveloper These tools are conveniently packaged as part of two suites 1 Enterprise Developer Suite which includes Oracle Designer, Oracle Developer, the Oracle8 database and Oracle Application Server 4.0 JDeveloper Suite which includes Oracle JDeveloper, the Oracle8 database and Oracle Application Server 4.0 Oracle Designer and Developer have been shipping for quite some time and have been enhanced to enable three-tier development using Oracle Application Server. Oracle Designer is primarily a modeling / generation tool for developing data driven applications. To develop webbased applications, developers use the tool the same way as they have traditionally. But at generation time, they may choose to generate the application for the middle-tier rather than for deployment on the client tier. Thus Designer developers can create an entirely new type of applications without doing anything significantly different. Oracle Developer is also a 4GL tool for developing enterprise class applications. Again for using this tool with OAS 4.0, developers do not have to incur any loss in productivity - developers use the tool as they have used earlier. At deployment time they can use the Forms cartridge or the Reports Cartridge or the Graphics cartridge to deploy the application on the OAS platform. Almost effortlessly, existing or new applications can be web enabled. And once deployed on the OAS, these applications obtain all the benefits of the OAS platform. JDeveloper is a 3GL tool for developing applications in Java. Programming in Java has numerous benefits which will not be enumerated here. Suffice it to say that at last count, the number of Java developers has swelled to over 700,000. Therefore JDeveloper is an important element of Oracle s tool offerings. Apart from providing the regular IDE support for Java development and database integration, JDeveloper has three specific integration hooks to facilitate development for OAS: JWEB Wizard: Enables interactive Java-based web applications which are deployed on OAS. JCORBA Wizard: Enables CORBA development in Java to be deployed on OAS. The JCORBA development model hides much of the complexity of CORBA and thus makes distributed application development much easier. Resulting applications can, of course, interoperate with other CORBA 2.0 compliant ORBs. PL2Java Wizard: Enables use of existing PL/SQL logic within Java applications. In the future, JDeveloper is planning to support the Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) model of development and deployment. In summary, Oracle Application Server is backed by comprehensive support for development from a range of Oracle Tools. MANAGEMENT TOOLS FOR OAS4.0: ENTERPRISE MANAGER 2.0 Many Oracle customers leverage Enterprise Manager (EM) to provide management for servers, and clients, across the enterprise. For several reasons, it is doing so by moving toward a three tier 1 There are other components in the suite. The list here covers only the main components. For details please see the datasheets for these offerings. 2
architecture. The middle tier is the management server itself with which the system administrator, through Java based thin clients, communicates to perform management and administrative activities. The management server in turn communicates with the managed targets via agents. The first reason for embracing this new model is that it is becoming quite common that the entities to be managed, potentially numbering in the tens of thousands, are widely distributed. The multi-tier approach, leveraging the infrastructure provided by OAS, allows Enterprise Manager to achieve the required scalability and implement an inherently distributed solution while removing complexity from client machines. Furthermore, Enterprise Manager wanted to provide extensibility so that products from third party vendors, as well as other Oracle products, could build application specific management tools that plug into Enterprise Manager and leverage the management framework and services it provides. This led the Enterprise Manager development team to adopt a java component-based development model and a CORBA based communication infrastructure to enable communication between different components. Rather than building the infrastructure from the ground up, they chose to deploy EM s management server on top of OAS 4.0. The component model paradigm is enabling the Enterprise Manager team to design and develop complicated software solutions in a short amount of time. Moreover, the application thus developed automatically gains from the scalability and reliability features of the OAS platform. ORACLE APPLICATIONS ON OAS4.0: ORACLE APPLICATIONS (R10.7 & R11.0 NCA ) For the 10.7 NCA release, the Oracle Applications developers had two goals: Lower cost of ownership through browser-based deployment Increase end user access via deployment over wide area networks 3
To achieve the first objective, Oracle Applications decided to embrace thin-client environments which required moving the complexity from the countless client machines back to the more manageable middle tier. Shifting from the two-tier paradigm to the three-tier paradigm would have been unimaginably difficult if Oracle Applications had not been built using Oracle s own development tools. This quantum leap by Oracle Applications was made possible simply by extending the toolset to allow an existing application the choice of two or three-tier deployment. Oracle Developer introduced the Forms cartridge that runs on OAS and executes the Forms logic. This way Oracle Applications customers do not have to worry about ongoing maintenance on any client machines. The Forms cartridge relies on the cartridge architecture of OAS 4.0 to provide deployment via a distributed site ensuring seamless scalability. With this approach only a few machines on the middle tier have to be managed. Here too, the failure recovery and management features of OAS are leveraged to provide value to higher level applications. Furthermore OAS s remote management console makes managing the mid-tier platform even easier and less costly. To further increase accessibility and enable more distributed deployments over low-cost wide area networks, Oracle Applications also provided HTML-based access to back-end applications as part of self-service applications. These use a combination of PL/SQL cartridges and Java web cartridges. PL/SQL cartridge makes it exceedingly easy to web-enable existing logic in the database thus improving customers time-to-market. Using this cartridge, Oracle Applications was able to come up with a number of modules (e.g. Web Customers, Web Suppliers etc.) in a very short amount of time. A new capability appearing in the upcoming R11 release of Oracle Applications, Oracle is adding two new modules based on the OAS Java cartridge to enable a self-service web requisition and procurement system. This will link procurement and requisition processes and provide end-users the ability to order products from a pre-approved list of vendors through a web interface. The system will let the vendors maintain product descriptions on their own web site and let these third party web sites cooperatively participate in the requisition and procurement processes of their customer s organization. As a self-service application, the number of users could easily be of the order of tens of thousands. 4
The system is going to be implemented in the form of several Java cartridges. The system achieves overall scalability for two reasons - taking the application intensive workload out of the database and also scaling through the multithreaded and distributed architecture of OAS itself. This system is an excellent example of how the OAS componentbased development model can be leveraged to develop and deploy scaleable applications. ORACLE PRODUCT SUMMARY FOR OAS 4.0 The following table illustrates a complete list of Oracle products that use OAS 4.0. Product Oracle Applications Oracle Developer Tool and Server Oracle Designer Tool JDeveloper Tool Product Description Back-office applications for the enterprise 4GL development tool and deployment cartridge Modeling tool, repository, and both 3GL and 4GL code generation tool Java development tool Value-add to customer using OAS Thin-client, wide area network (WAN) deployment & self service apps Develop once, deploy thick client/server or thin-client applications Design and generate front-office web applications Single IDE for client, middle & data tier development Release (shipping or expected to ship in next 6 months) R11.0, R11.5 Key OAS Features Used Configuration, loadbalancing, failover & management capabilities. Applications utilize a mix of C, PL/SQL and Java cartridges V6.0 Runs as a cartridge. Configuration, loadbalancing, failover & management capabilities. 2.x, 6.0 Java & PL/SQL cartridge generation 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 Wizards for developing JWeb, JCORBA, and EJB cartridges. Includes utilities for generating Java wrappers to existing PL/SQL procedures. Enterprise Manager UI Kit Enterprise Manager (Base Platform) Consistent UI for managing EM, Oracle8 and OAS System management product for the enterprise Ease of use, re-use of existing DBA skillsets for OAS DBA & system admins can now manage distributed DBMS and OAS instances from a single browser EM2.0, OAS4 EM Java UI Tool Kit 2.0 EM uses OAS core ORB server to run in distributed mode and provide browser access. 5
Enterprise Manager (Agents), OAS (MIB-Agent) Internet Commerce Server Oracle Payment Server Management of OAS and applications deployed on it through EM Electronic Commerce on the Internet Facilitate business to business commerce Integrated management for middle-tier components Thin client access and platform for running the business logic Thin client access and platform for running the business logic Data Mart Suite Data warehousing Web access to analysis tools Express OLAP OLAP Web access to server analysis plus distributed platform for running Express Discoverer Oracle Video Server Tool for data analysis For storing and playing multimedia data and capturing end-user interactions, hooks into service provider s billing systems agents Thin client access to analysis plus distributed platform for running engine Set top box access for video download and HTTP backchannel. Distributed platfrom for running engine and application hosting. Integration platform for complete services around video delivery 2.1 2.0 Monitoring and management of applications deployed on OAS & OAS itself 1.0, 1.1 Java & PL/SQLcartridges, Session management, scalability and manageability. 1.0, 1.1 Java cartridge, session management scalability and manageability. 1.x, 2.0 PL/SQLCartridges. 6.3 Thin client access, C++ cartridge, IIOP for communication, load balancing. 3.1.x Thin client access, C- Web cartridge, CORBA technology, scalability and manageability 3.x Web access, ORB for communication. Scalability and manageability. CONCLUSION The examples above make it clear that OAS 4.0 is backed by a comprehensive offering from Oracle. Apart from this impressive line up of OAS-enabled products, Oracle s customers can expect to obtain the same support and consulting services that has made Oracle a successful partner with every major enterprise. Moreover customers get proven and end-to-end solutions. Since Oracle s product stack is built on open standards, these solutions can interoperate with customers existing systems and avoid single vendor lock-in. Moreover as the above product integration examples show, OAS provides rich mechanisms for deploying enterprise applications. Customers can choose to fully embrace the component based route for their applications; as Enterprise Manager has done. Alternatively, customers can gradually move their applications to the multi-tier model by first enabling thin clients; as Oracle Applications is doing. In either case, OAS 4.0 offers the least cost path to web and component-based applications, improving time-to-market and gaining competitive advantage. 6
Many vendors can claim Application Server product offerings, but no vendor other than Oracle, can claim such a commitment to the platform. Customers evaluating mid-tier decisions have a wide and confusing choice of products and vendors to choose from. In choosing Oracle s Application Server, customers can be confident that the platform they choose is a strategic one to the vendor, as well as to the customers themselves. Oracle Application Server 4.0 The Intertegration Platform for Oracle Products and the Internet August 1998 Copyright Oracle Corporation 1998 All Rights Reserved Printed in the U.S.A. This document is provided for informational purposes only and the information herein is subject to change without notice. Please report any errors herein to Oracle Corporation. Oracle Corporation does not provide any warranties covering and specifically disclaims any liability in connection with this document. Oracle is a registered trademark, Enabling the Information Age, and Oracle8 are trademarks of Oracle Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned are used for identification purposes onlyandmaybetrademarksoftheirrespectiveowners. Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: 415.506.7000 Fax 415.506.7200 Copyright Oracle Corporation 1998 All Rights Reserved 7