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Web/Internet Connections

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, everyone seems to be focusing on Web-enabling their applications and products. The great herd of computer vendors has seen a market that is selling and rushing to get there. Oracle is no exception to this trend. In the case of Oracle and a few other information vendors , this direction is well justified and can lead to a number of better ways of doing business.

The key benefit of implementing connections using the methods found on the Web on your local intranet is the "thin" client. Client server architectures require that you load and configure additional communications software on each computer that uses the databases. In addition, in two- tier architectures, you have to load the business software on each of the client workstations. When an update to the software comes out, you have to distribute these updates to everyone at just the right time. For organizations with hundreds or thousands of people, this can be a very significant cost. However, if you use a Web interface, the server downloads the data correctly to any machine that has a properly configured Web browser (which is provided by default with Windows 95 and Windows NT). Any applications that are run on the local workstations (that is, Java or ActiveX) are downloaded automatically on an as-needed basis. Many information systems organizations see Web architectures as having more benefits on their local intranets in the short term than those that can be gained from access to the Internet.

The Internet really started to take off when some scientists developed what now is referred to as the World Wide Web. Their goal was quite simple: Devise a format that enables you to easily share text and graphics in documents over a network. This format includes a series of navigational constructs that enable you to move between documents and sections of documents. The power of this concept soon took hold, and a number of extensions were added to it to make it even more powerful:

• Tools that enable you to easily find Web content you might be interested in (Domain Name Servers to help you locate a particular server by using names such as www.oracle.com, instead of long IP addresses such as 10.1.1.1) and even content locators (which enable you to enter a set of keywords and then return to you a list of sites that might contain the information you want).
• Extensions to the basic storage formatthe Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)that enable you to have multiple windows ( frames ) in a given document. Extensions are in the works to enable complex formatting of Web documents, similar to the formatting you see in full-feature word processors or desktop publishing packages.
• Extensions that enable you to drive the content of the Web page from programs and databases, instead of just static text pages. (This is a major focus of this section, and it is discussed shortly.)
• Display capabilities for a number of media other than text and graphics to include audio and video in addition to animations.

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You should consider Web-based applications for your environment for several reasons:

• The architecture is simple to implement. You have your network types set up the communications protocols and Web browsers on the client workstations. After that, the rest of the system is under your control on the server side.
• You easily can upgrade your Web applications. All you do is update your data and application software on the server, and clients automatically access the updates so that the support staff does not have to go to each workstation to load the updates.
• Web browsers for a wide variety of computers are already out there. This means that someone else has to worry about the details of how to implement a printing routine on a particular UNIX platform or how the Macintosh communications stack works. All you have to do is write your application software.
• You can use the Internet to service clients within your organization and around the world. You might want to pay some extra attention to security if you are enabling access to your Web site to the general Internet, but otherwise things remain basically the same.

Although the Web is not the answer to all of mankind's problems, it is a useful tool in the all-too-busy information systems world where you are struggling constantly to add new features and deliver new applications. You might want to consider a few disadvantages or factors, though, before you start converting everything to the Web:

• The load on your server can be more than that in the client/server environment. This is true if you build all the processing logic on the server side (you can build the processing to occur on the client side if you set up things correctly). Some Web sites have become severely loaded down from processing complex user profiles and gathering almost all their information from databases instead of merely accessing static text pages.
• The Web is a new area of development. Although I have found most of the tools to be quite functional and stable, you should carefully evaluate your development and Web server tools before you start building applications. Specifically, you should check to see whether anyone else is using these tools to build something as big and complex as the site you are considering.
• You might want to check to see if people are available to you to do the development. You might need to retrain some of your existing staff and therefore need to budget time and funds for this training. If you hire consultants to perform the work, you might want to check out their rates (which often are much higher than you might be used to paying for FORTRAN programmers, for example).

There is a very high-level structure of a typical Web/database environment. The client workstation needs to have only an operating system that supports TCP/IP network access and a Web browser. On the server side, you have the Web server. In the case of the Oracle Web Server product, it is actually part of the database. Many others, such as Netscape and Microsoft's

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