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Oracle Corp. takes an all-in-one approach with its Oracle9i Application Server Release 2, which provides lots of extra trimmings for more complex Web application development.
Organizations developing custom portals or building document management systems and those that want to deploy business intelligence tools using an intranet site will find that the completeness of Oracles offering will save time and money.
In particular, new Web site click stream analysis features, as well as back-end XML and packaged application data integration, are valuable pluses with this release.
Those developing more bread-and-butter Web applications have lots of choices in this mature market and can opt to go with any number of Java application servers based on their needs. IBMs WebSphere and BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic are Oracle9i Application Servers most direct competitors.
Like these two products, Oracle9i Application Server, which is available now, cant run business logic in any language but Java, so C or C++ developers will find the multilingual Sybase Inc. Enterprise Application Server or Microsoft Corp. Windows 2000 Server more suitable options.
Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 (officially Version 9.0.2) provides a mostly J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) 1.3-compatible application server supporting Java 1.3-based application development. Not all the required EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) 2.0 features are supported yet; a point update, Version 9.0.3, will be J2EE 1.3-compatible. It will be a drop-in replacement for 9.0.2, and Oracle said it expects to ship it in the next two months. (See “Changes Ahead for JSP Developers” for the upcoming JavaServer Pages 2.0 standard.)
The Standard Edition has a base price of $10,000 per CPU and includes the Java application server, The Apache Software Foundations Apache HTTP Server and the TopLink object-relational mapping tool (which Oracle acquired earlier this year from WebGain Inc.). The Standard Edition also offers a portal development kit and Oracles IFS (Internet File System), a database-based file system.
The Standard Edition supports clustering using a shared network directory but lacks centralized cluster administration, so doing cluster deployments will be painful.
The Enterprise Edition, which costs $20,000 per CPU, is where Oracle differentiates itself. It contains all Standard Edition features plus a long list of additions: Oracles Web cache server, Oracle9iAS Reports database reporting server, Oracle9iAS Discoverer online analytical processing server, Oracle9iAS Forms server and Oracles LDAP server. (BEA, IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. all also include LDAP servers in their application servers.)
All parts of the application except IFS (which has its own user list) can use the LDAP server for single-sign-on capabilities.
The Enterprise Editions new click stream analysis server provides data such as the current number of Web site users, their Web browser types and operating systems, referring URLs, and so on. Release 2 also features a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration server and a data integration server, Oracle9iAS InterConnect.
InterConnect has an impressive reach, providing custom adapters for Oracle databases (currently, no other databases are supported), XML, IBMs MQSeries and Customer Information Control System servers, as well as enterprise resource planning applications from SAP AG, Siebel Systems Inc., PeopleSoft Inc. and J.D. Edwards & Co. BEA and IBM have data integration packages as well but at significant extra cost.
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Oracle also sells two Enterprise Edition options, a personalization engine and a wireless and mobile device publishing add-on. Each of these costs $10,000 per CPU.
Both the Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition are available on Windows, Linux, Solaris and several other Unix operating systems and support all major Web servers. We tested the Windows version of the Enterprise Edition with the built-in Apache Web server. (The Windows code started shipping in June.)
Development versions of the application server are free, and integration plug-ins are available for all the major Java development tools.
Oracle9i Application Server Release 2s management console has been reworked and now uses Oracles standard Enterprise Manager console to manage servers and clusters.
In fact, Oracle has been working on making clustering seamless. We built a cluster of three machines and were able to deploy a single application to all of them in a single step. Enterprise Edition uses a database-based configuration repository to manage clusters, and many administrative tasks automatically apply clusterwide with the repository installed.
Unfortunately, this repository does not support Oracles RAC (Real Application Clusters) or other methods of building highly available Oracle databases—a manual database switch-over is required if the repository database (which is a single point of failure) goes down. RAC support will ship by the end of the year, according to Oracle officials.
Oracle9i Application Server supports HTTP session object and EJB clustering and provides in-memory replication of state information. With state replication enabled, we were able to kill any selected application server Java virtual machine in tests and still not lose state information.
EJB state replication has scalability problems because all EJB objects broadcast state information to all other machines in the cluster. A way to create smaller state replication zones (which is possible with HTTP session clustering) would be more efficient.
Round-robin load balancing is the only option available. Weighted round robin is planned and would allow for clusters of machines of different strengths.
West Coast Technical Director Timothy Dyck is at [email protected].
Executive Summary
: Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 Enterprise Edition”>
Executive Summary: Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 Enterprise Edition
|
Usability |
Good |
|
Capability |
Excellent |
|
Performance |
Excellent |
|
Interoperability |
Good |
|
Manageability |
Good |
|
Scalability |
Good |
|
Security |
Good |
Oracles application server will appeal to those developing custom portals with business intelligence or wireless components or those writing internal integration systems, as the product includes pre-integrated packages that address these areas. It also is one way to get Oracles database-based file system, IFS. Compared with competitors, its load balancing offers fewer options when deploying more complex clusters.
COST ANALYSIS
Oracle pricing is in the market midrange—$10,000 per CPU for just the application server components or $20,000 per CPU for application server plus caching, data integration, data analysis, click stream analysis, reporting, forms and LDAP directory.
(+) Provides a large set of add-ons missing from rival systems (or provided at extra cost); flexible, full-featured Web cache; click stream analysis provides detailed site usage reports; new XML and packaged application integration features.
(-) Offers only round-robin load balancing; single-sign-on features dont work with IFS component; EJB clustering doesnt scale up well as the number of machines in the cluster increases; doesnt support warm or hot database failover.
EVALUATION SHORT LIST
- BEAs WebLogic
- IBMs WebSphere
- Suns Sun Open Net Environment Application Server
- www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/ias