Preface

For more than 15 years, Oracle Corporation has been one of the world's leading technology companies. Much of the company's reputation is built on its enterprise database product ”the leading database for online transaction processing and enterprise applications for more than a decade . In recent years , however, Oracle has enhanced its product offerings to encompass a complete technology stack, including the E-Business Suite (providing applications), the Collaboration Suite (providing communication throughout an organization), and Oracle Application Server, which is the focus of this book.

Oracle Application Server is a middle- tier application platform suite offering a variety of capabilities. Although Oracle Application Server has grown in popularity and functionality in recent years, there has been a dearth of third-party books about the product. Our goal is to remedy this situation.

In this book, we use the term Oracle Application Server to refer mainly to Oracle Application Server 10 g , the latest release of Oracle's product. Where necessary, we also describe features in the previous product releases, particularly in Oracle9 i Application Server. Many features are identical across versions. Note, however, that because some readers may be using older releases, when we describe a new feature that was first made available in a particular release, we indicate that fact to help avoid confusion.