Chapter 2: Oracle Application Server 10g Architecture

Overview

In Chapter 1, we looked at some of the components that make up Oracle Application Server 10 g and how those components support the various development standards and frameworks available to developers today. On the development side, we ve seen that Oracle Application Server 10 g :

• Supports the full J2EE stack, including elements such as JavaServer Pages (JSPs), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), and servlets

• Provides support for existing Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Discoverer worksheets

• Provides a complete development, deployment, and administrative portal environment

• Supports various wireless devices and their corresponding protocols

• Provides full support for Web Services

If this was the extent of the Oracle Application Server 10 g product stack, it would be an incredibly powerful product. Oracle, however, has added numerous features in addition to those already mentioned that further enhance its usefulness and functionality. While developers and administrators are not required to use any of these features, the work taken to master and implement these technologies will provide productivity benefits that will, in most cases, far outweigh ignoring them.

This chapter deals with features specific to Oracle Application Server 10 g that provide developers with an environment that is secure, stable, scalable, and reliable. These technologies augment existing methods , saving developers and administrators the overhead of mastering these new technologies from scratch. In most cases, developers and administrators can take their existing knowledge of application development and deployment and enhance it with the topics discussed in this chapter to speed application development time, create more secure applications, decrease application deployment and user provisioning time, and increase the availability of deployed applications. The topics addressed in this chapter include:

• Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE (OC4J)

• Oracle Application Server 10 g security architecture

• Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server (OPMN)