WAS Product Purchase

WAS is available for Windows NT and HP-UX. You are required to purchase Oracle Application Developer Kit licenses with a purchase of WAS, and the price for the WAS includes the ADK.

The price for each operating system and version includes licensing for eight concurrent devices per processor configuration; to get more devices, you must purchase additional kits.

The WAS comes in a Standard Version and an Advanced Version, described in the following sections.

Standard Version

The Standard Version is the basic product, and contains all WAS 3.0 features, except for those included in the Advanced Version.

Advanced Version

The Advanced Version includes all of the Standard Version features, plus the following:

•  The Transaction Service: This is a service of the WRB that is modeled on the XA interface defined by the X/Open. It is used by applications that require transactions that span multiple HTTP requests. In other words, if your Web screens need to lock records on one page and take the user through a series of hyperlinks before being ready to commit or rollback changes, you would benefit from this option.

•  The Content Service: This enables you to save arbitrary documents or data objects in repositories.

•  The ODBC Cartridge: See the earlier discussion about this.

•  Distributed Cartridges: You need this feature if you intend to run any cartridges on remote nodes. Without it, you can still run cartridges, but they will all be on the same node.

Web Developer Suite

One way to obtain the WAS and all related Oracle development tools in one cost- effective package is to get the Oracle Web 0Developer Suite. Version 1.6 of the Oracle WDS includes full development licenses for the these products:

•  Designer/2000

•  Developer/2000 and Developer/2000 Server

•  Oracle Web Application Server 3.0, Advanced Edition

•  Oracle Data Server, Enterprise Edition

•  Oracle Web Development Kit (which includes the last prerelease of Oracle AppBuilder for Java)

•  Open Tools Initiative CD-ROM

•  1-Year Oracle Technology Network membership

The Suite includes everything required to create applications, including the Oracle RDBMS, at a lower price than if you purchased each product separately. It’s available for Windows NT and UNIX platforms, including Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, and DEC Alpha UNIX.

The Future of Oracle Web Application Server

Most applications are going to the Web, meaning either the World Wide Web, corporate intranets, or extranets. The WAS is the most powerful, flexible tool a developer can have to meet any challenge in the new environments. Armed with the WAS, developers can develop in any language, access any database, and deploy to any platform. No better option exists now, nor is there one anticipated, that can empower developers to face any Web-related programming challenge like the WAS.

The follow-on product to Oracle’s Web Application Server 3.0 is called Oracle Application Server 4.0. OAS 4.0 will come in two editions: the Application Server 4.0 and the Application Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition.

The scheduled release date for Application Server 4.0 is the end of the fourth quarter, fiscal year 1998. The Enterprise Edition is due to come out in the first quarter of fiscal year 1999.

Summary

The Oracle Web Application Server is truly a revolutionary product. It provides the most robust, reliable, and secure method to deliver virtually any program written in any language to any user on any platform. It gives the developer full flexibility to incorporate various resources into one application, to access data from any source, and to do so in a way that is as accessible and user friendly as possible. It is fully distributed, supports industry standards, and is fully scalable and less expensive to maintain than previous methods, such as client/server. As part of the Network Computing Architecture, the WAS provides the opportunity to achieve a great goal: the establishment of the computer as a ubiquitous state-of-the-art tool for everyone, with the power of a network behind it, that is as easy to use as a common household appliance.