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by Stephen L. O'Hearn
Oracle’s Web Application Server 3.0 is one of the most important products Oracle has ever released. The WAS 3.0 is much more than a way to send Oracle database information across the Web to your browser: WAS promises to reinvent application development and deployment as we have known it. It is the only open, standards-based, fully scalable platform for delivering applications from virtually any source, across any Web-based network, to virtually any platform, in a manner that is less expensive and faster to deploy than other methods. Its flexible development options, highly distributed architecture, solid reliability, robustness, and fault tolerance, make it the leading tool for the development and deploying of mission critical enterprise applications. There really is no other product that competes with it.
The WAS is an application server that works with virtually any Web server, such as Netscape, Spyglass (which comes bundled with the WAS), Apache, or Microsoft. It has the ability to work with different, and even incompatible, Web servers to process incoming requests through multiple ports.
The cartridge architecture of the WAS allows developers to deploy applications written in PL/SQL, Java, Perl, C, and virtually any other language. Developers can manage cartridges independently, taking cartridges up and down as needed without affecting the others, and even incorporate third-party server extensions. Load balancing and application partitioning are all accomplished easily.
The WAS is at the heart of Oracle’s Network Computing Architecture (NCA). It is based on the CORBA (Common Object Request Brokerage Architecture) model, an industry standard for empowering distributed objects across a network to achieve cross-platform interoperability. In other words, the WAS lets you use multiple programs, files, and other resources, including legacy code and the latest Java applet, and regardless of any language or operating system, integrate everything into one robust application, delivered to any user anywhere.
Unless you’re that guy on a Pacific Island in that one episode of Gilligan’s Island who thought that World War II was still in progress, chances are you know about the Internet. But just in case you’re that guy, here’s a brief review.
Review for That Guy
In 1969, an agency of the United States Department of Defense known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recognized that the United States was building a very valuable resource: several computer centers, located at various universities and government agencies around the country, containing a growing amount of electronic documents with scientific and other data, each with their own local user community of people who were exchanging email messages and computer files about their research. DARPA decided to connect these electronic communities of people to each other, encouraging America’s leading research centers to increase their exchange of information, and building a redundant network that could stay operational even if part of the network were damaged, such as in a war or natural disaster.
The network was built on the TCP/IP suite of protocols, and built on a backbone of high-speed data communications lines connecting the major computer systems. It was designed to support electronic mail and the transfer of files back and forth between the various online members of the electronic community—in other words, to increase information exchange among the scientific research community.
Over time, other existing networks were connected, new organizations got connected, one thing led to another, and the International Network of computers, or Internet, began to grow.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee created a communications protocol intended to support the widespread distribution of files, including text and images, to the various computers on the Internet, regardless of what brand of hardware or what sort of operating system was involved. Within a few short years, the World Wide Web grew astronomically, as “Web sites” mushroomed everywhere, publishing everything from “Joan’s Recipes” to the New York Times, and empowering anyone with a computer to publish information to the masses more quickly and less expensively than any other media ever known.
Today, the Internet supports a number of services, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP), electronic mail, Usenet news (the electronic bulletin board system, also known as Newsgroups), Gopher, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Telnet, and the World Wide Web (WWW), as well as others. Nobody really knows how many people are connected worldwide, but the estimates are far into the many millions.
The Web is the reason this chapter is in this book. While it is an outstanding file delivery mechanism, its potential as an application deployment tool is only beginning to be fully realized—led by Oracle’s Web Application Server.
In order to understand the Oracle Web Application Server product, you must first have some understanding of the Web itself.
The term “Web” is used to refer to the World Wide Web, but sometimes it’s used to refer to an intranet. The World Wide Web is a subset of the Internet. An intranet is a closed network, not connected to the Internet, but that uses the same communication protocols, Web servers, and browsers, that are used on the World Wide Web. It is estimated that there are more Web servers supporting corporate and other intranets throughout the world than there are Web servers on the actual World Wide Web.
The Web is made up of a network of computers running Web server software, available to receive and process requests from any client software. For example, when you log in to the Internet and start up your browser software, such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, you can enter a Web address in the Location field, such as:
http://www.corbinian.com
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