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• client and server components of an application. Designer/2000's repository is similar in most respects to its predecessor's, Oracle*CASE. Its user interface and functionality are enhanced significantly, however, and it supports graphical business process reengineering as well as Oracle8 Server and Developer/2000 features. The Designer/2000's repository stores analysis, design, and generation data.
  Designer/2000 is a complex tool with many features. After you've mastered it, you'll find that the task of developing sophisticated applications from start to finish is faster and much more efficient than it is with traditional development methods . Information collected through its graphical diagrams for data and application modeling is used to generate sophisticated, bug-free data definition language (DDL) and application code. Designer/2000 generates full-featured , full-functioning applications for Developer/2000 tools, complete with menus , security, transaction control, and extensibility for OLE containers. Application generators also are in the works for Visual Basic and Power Objects.
  
• Developer/2000: The Developer/2000 suite packages Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle Graphics, and Oracle Book into a single integrated development environment. You can build your applications by using just these tools or by using them with Designer/2000 to produce generated forms and reports .
  Developer/2000 for the Web enables you to run your binary files on the Oracle Web Server as applets. Soon, Designer/2000 will come with an option that enables you to generate Java code. This feature will make it ideal for one to migrate from traditional client/server to Web-based applications, where the client simply runs applets and displays data through a Web browser. This is one of Oracle's strongest efforts, considering their push for the Network Computer.
  As with their character-based predecessors, SQL*Forms and SQL*ReportWriter, the Developer/2000 tools use PL/SQL as their underlying scripting language, although Oracle will soon be supporting Java code as it does PL/SQL. Applications developed on one type of workstation platform can be deployed on other platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, and X Window.
• Power Objects: In addition to the Designer/2000 and Developer/2000 tools, the Oracle GUI product suite includes another object-oriented, GUI application environment designed to compete with the likes of PowerBuilder and Visual Basic. Power Objects provides a rapid application development environment with many drag-and-drop features and automatic database-transaction management. Instead of using the PL/SQL language used by Developer/2000, Power Objects uses a Visual Basic_style scripting language that is similar in most respects to Microsoft Visual Basic and is well suited for small to mid- size applications.

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Oracle Directions

Oracle Corporation continues to be a forward-thinking leader in the technology sector by introducing new technologies that provide extended functionality and better management, development capability, connectivity, and performance for scalable client/server database systems. The following are some of these new technologies:

• Wireless client/server: Oracle recently introduced connectivity and messaging technologies that support remote client/server computing. This technology, which operates over cellular data networks, is particularly useful for laptop and palmtop users. A slightly more advanced form of client/server computing, Oracle Mobile Agents, uses a client-agent-server architecture that enables a client to work offline and connect periodically to the network to submit requests and receive results from the server. The agent component of this architecture functions on behalf of the client in its absence from the network.
• Internet/World Wide Web interface: You can use Oracle's Web Interface Kit to integrate World Wide Web servers into Oracle8 databases. Oracle also provides the Oracle Web Server to support the new Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standards. These tools provide utilities to create Web pages and to interface Oracle8 data to them, enabling both storage and retrieval of object-relational data by Web users. With the Oracle Web Server, you can embed HTML code inside a PL/SQL stored procedure. The HTML is sent to the client browser through a PL/SQL package.
• Multimedia server: As applications use more types of data, especially multimedia data, database server technologies will improve to manage them. In future releases of Oracle Server, you'll see increased support for text and document data, audio and video data, and object-oriented data access. Oracle began work on its multimedia server several years ago and leads its competitors in the development of storage and retrieval technologies. This high-throughput, high-speed server technology delivers video on demand to consumers, using set-top, smart TV processors as clients .
• Multidimensional OLAP: This capability provides processing to aid in the analysis and storage of large data warehouses without the need for rollup tables. With Oracle's Discoverer, an OLAP and reporting tool, users can analyze data cubes of preaggregated data. This capability enables you to separate some of your intensive query-and-reporting demands from your production system.
• Network Computing Architecture (NCA): Oracle wants to move beyond the traditional client/server architecture to the Network Computer, which is a more specialized client. Although NCA is not as powerful as a traditional workstation, it performs the new CORBA standards regarding object requests, Java interpretation, HTML manipulation, and seamless interface to intranets or the Internet using a browser that can run any business application as an applet.

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Summary

This chapter provides an overview of client/server computing (as it applies to database systems) and discusses the role of Oracle products in client/server environments. Oracle has a well-designed approach throughout its product line to support applications running in global, enterprise-wide client/server systems. Although Oracle Corporation is most famous for its database server, it has many other sophisticated, mature front-end and network products that complement and extend the functionality of the server.

Many Oracle8 Server features are well suited to client/server systems; a complete solution is provided with the RDBMS server, products, and client-development tools. As the scope and functionality of client/server systems evolve into the new Network Computer paradigm, Oracle continues to introduce products that support new infrastructure technologies and make the task of designing, developing, and implementing complex systems manageable and efficient.

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