Summary

In this chapter we identified the architecture of the Oracle 10g AS server as being composed of an infrastructure and one or more mid-tier installations. Each mid- tier installation receives and processes client requests that can come in the form of J2EE, standard Apache, Forms, Reports, Discoverer, or Portal requests . The three types of mid-tier installations are J2EE and Web Cache, Portal and Wireless, and Business Intelligence and Forms.

The infrastructure exists to manage product metadata, synchronization, clustering, and Identity Management for the mid-tier installations. The background processes OPMN and DCM manage the subcomponents of each instance and keep the software installation configurations in sync with the file-based repositories and Metadata Repository databases.

A Web Cache server may optionally be deployed in front of the mid-tier installation to improve performance and scalability. Systems requiring high availability can take advantage of application server clustering to provide additional performance and fault tolerance.