Oracle Application Server Demystified

Although the Oracle Application Server (OAS) has been around for a number of years it has become more pervasive in the past few years with the advent of multi-tier computing, but with the changes in technology and evolution of the product, it's not always easy to be certain of what OAS is or what it does.

This article attempts to rectify that and provides links to further information to answer questions like "How do you install Oracle Application Server?" and "What's the difference between the 9i and 10g versions?".

What is Oracle Application Server?

OAS is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware which is a suite of products providing developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management facilities to organisations.

OAS itself provides the infrastructure to enable you to develop, manage and integrate your business applications, portals and web services. This infrastructure enables you to build scalable and highly-available multi-tier systems by enabling load-balancing and clustering at each tier.

What Does It Do?

OAS is more like a suite of products rather than a single product and is available in 4 editions to cater for organisations of all sizes with the components (products) available depending on which edition is licensed.

The editions available are:

• Java Edition. This enables the development and deployment of enterprise Java applications and comprises:-
  • Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) - a small footprint Java container that hosts Enterprise Java Beans and provides the required security, connectivity and naming support;
  • Toplink which provides the persistence framework for Java objects by mapping Java structures to relational tables;
  • ADF (Application Development Framework) - a flexible development framework based on Struts and Java Server Faces;
  • JDeveloper - the Java IDE;
  • and Oracle Business Rules - a facility allowing non-technical business users to define and maintain business rules outside of any application via web-based interface.
• Standard Edition One - designed for departments and small organisations, includes all the features from the Java Edition plus Oracle Portal which enables organisations to build portals (doorways) to disparate sources of information and make it available in one place (in the same manner that Google, Yahooand MSN aggregate different pieces of information on their websites).
• Standard Edition. This is designed for mid-sized organisations. It has the same features as SE1 plus it allows limited use of Oracle Internet Directory (OID). OID is a Light Weight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory service providing a centralised repository of information about users, applications and databases (replacing the Oracle*Names server for that purpose) as well as single sign-on (SSO).
• Enterprise Edition - includes all the features of the other editions plus many other features to provide large organisations with support for Java applications, enterprise portals, identity management, business intelligence and wireless access. Features in the Enterprise Edition not available in the other editions include the Forms and Reports Servers, Oracle Discoverer and the Enterprise Service Bus which enables the integration of applications and data between organisations as part of a service-oriented architecture.

Conclusion

A good starting point for more information is the appserver section of Oracle's web site.

Retrun from Oracle Application Server to Oracle Consulting