Components needed

To run all of the examples in this book you will need Oracle Application Server 10g, Business Intelligene and Forms installation option

If you are running an Intel-based machine (Windows or Linux) you will need a PC with at least a 1.5GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and 15GB of disk space.

If you are running a Unix-based machine, the guidelines above should meet all of your needs, but check with your installation guide for specifics.

The above requirements are just for the application server; if you plan on running the components listed below on the same machine, add some more CPU power, RAM and disk space. These components include Oracle Developer Suite 10g - which includes the following components discussed in this book: Oracle Forms Developer 10g, Oracle Reports Developer 10g, Oracle JDeveloper 10g, Oracle Discoverer Administration Edition

If you are running on an Intel-based machine (Windows or Linux) you will need a PC with at least a 1.5GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 15GB of disk space.

If you are running on a Unix-based machine, the guidelines above should meet all of your needs, but check with your installation guide for specifics.

The above requirements are just for the development suite; if you plan on running the application server on the same machine, add some more CPU power, RAM and disk space.

If your application server is on one machine and you ˜re going to do the examples in the book on another, some chapters will require you to move files between machines. To move a file to a Unix machine, you will need ftp access. To move a file to a Windows machine, you will need a shared directory. If you don ˜t have these privileges, contact your system administrator.

Audience

This book is intended for those developers who wish to develop Web-based applications that use Oracle development technologies. No one development tool is perfect for every circumstance, so this book discusses all of the major development tools available today. Since the book was designed to discuss the many different development options available to developers today, it is a wide book - that is, it discusses many different technologies and gives you the basics of getting started with each tool. For a deeper discussion of the topics in these chapters, see Appendix A.

How this book is organized

Oracle Application Server 10g Web Development is broken into four parts , including an overview (Part IV).

Chapter 1: Overview Of Technologies

This chapter provides an overview of what Oracle Application Server is capable of. It lists the technologies available to you, the developer, how Oracle implements various Web-based standards and introduces the security features Oracle has built into the application server.

Chapter 2: Application Server Architecture

Chapter 2 discusses the architecture of Oracle Application Server 10g and focuses on Oracle ˜s Containers for Java (OC4J). OC4J provides a full set of Java services to the application server that surpasses the features found in any other application server on the market today.

Chapter 3: Oracle Forms

Oracle Forms is one of Oracle ˜s most mature development environments. It is tightly integrated with the Oracle database and provides developers with an intuitive graphical development environment. This chapter discusses the basics of developing Forms and 11 discuss integrating Forms with the Application Server and Portal environments, respectively.

Chapter 4: Oracle Reports

Along with Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports is one of Oracle ˜s most mature development environments. It is tightly integrated with the Oracle database and provides developers with an intuitive graphical development environment to design sophisticated reports easily. This chapter discusses the basics of developing Reports and 11 discuss integrating Reports with the Application Server and Portal environments, respectively.

Chapter 5: Oracle Discoverer

Oracle Discoverer is a tool for allowing end-users to construct ad-hoc reports without seriously affecting the impact on your database. Chapter 5 discusses how this works, how to create Discoverer workbooks and worksheets and how to view them via the web.

Chapter 6: Incorporating Forms, Reports & Discoverer into AS

Once your Forms, Reports and Discoverer objects are created, how do you move them to the web easily and securely? Chapter 6 discusses moving the forms, reports and Discoverer objects, re-compilation on the target server, how do secure the objects and how to access them.

Chapter 7: The PLSQL Web Toolkit and PSPs

The PL/SQL toolkit allows you to write code as database procedures, functions and packages that Oracle Application Server can call directly. This feature eliminates the need to use a development tool to access Oracle data over the web. This chapter discusses the fundamentals of the web toolkit and discusses PL/SQL Server Pages (PSPs) - the PL/SQL programmer ˜s answer to Java Server Pages (JSPs).

Chapter 8: Portal Architecture

OracleAS Portal allows you to develop portlets (Portal components like forms and reports) and content pages (for unstructured data like Microsoft Word documents) easily. The Portal environment, while straightforward, is probably unlike any development environment you ˜ve seen before. This chapter explores the OracleAS Portal environment and walks you through the creation of a simple OracleAS Portal component.

Chapter 9: Portal Development Part 1

There are many different types of components you can create in OracleAS Portal. This chapter discusses the most common components you are likely to come across: OracleAS Portal Forms, OracleAS Portal Reports, OracleAS Portal Charts, OracleAS Portal Dynamic Pages, OracleAS Portal Lists Of Values and OracleAS Portal XML Components.

Chapter 10: Portal Development Part 2

This chapter continues the discussion of OracleAS Portal components by discussing OracleAS Portal Calendars, OracleAS Portal Hierarchies, OracleAS Portal Menus, OracleAS Portal URLs, OracleAS Portal Links and OracleAS Portal Data Components. This chapter also discusses content, content management and OracleAS Portal Page Design.

Chapter 11: Incorporating Forms, Reports & Discoverer into Portal

This chapter talks about ways to take Oracle Forms, Oracle reports and Oracle Discoverer workbooks and worksheets and integrate them with OracleAS Portal Pages. By doing this, we can integrate these components with OracleAS Portal ˜s security features and visual templates, allowing you to maintain a consistent look across your portal.

Chapter 12: Java in the Oracle Database

There are so many options for integrating application that use Java technologies that developers often overlook one of the simplest ways: storing your Java code directly in the Oracle database. This chapter shows how to store and call Java code in the Oracle database.

Chapter 13: JDeveloper

Oracle JDeveloper 10g has won numerous development awards and it ˜s easy to see why. It is one of the most complete IDEs available on the market today. While entire books are devoted to it, this chapter introduces the basics of Oracle JDeveloper 10g and will have you writing Java applications in a very short period of time.

Chapter 14: JSPs

Java Server Pages are a really cool technology that allows you to greatly enhance the functionality of your web pages easily. This chapter introduces you to JSPs, talks about scopes, syntax and configuration and talks about extending JSP functionality by way of tag libraries.

Chapter 15: Deploying EARs, WARs, JARs and JSPs to AS

After you ˜ve done all of this work on your Java-based application, how do you move it to the application server? This chapter talks about the three basic ways of performing this task with the pros and cons of each method discussed.

Chapter 16: XML

For many developers, XML is a scary subject. They know it ˜s becoming ubiquitous, but few understand how it related to Web-based applications using Oracle data sources. This chapter outlines the XML basics along with Oracle ˜s implementation of XML- related technologies.

Chapter 17: Web Services

Have you tried to learn Web Services, but were overwhelmed by the amount of pre-requisite knowledge you needed to have before you could start putting all of the pieces together? This chapter clearly outlines the basics of web services, how they can make you a better developer and how they fit into the Oracle Application Server 10g technology stack.

Getting the most out of this book

With the advent of Beatlemania in the 60 ˜s, a new type of magazine started hitting the newsstands - one devoted to the once-taboo music of Rock and Roll. John Lennon once (in)famously said that reading about rock and roll was like reading about sex. He used a much cruder term than sex , but this is a family book, so we ll leave it at that. I would like you to take the spirit of Lennon s words when approaching this book. There is a lot to learn by simply reading the pages, but to truly experience all it has to offer, I encourage you to listen to the music by sitting down and working through the examples. It is only this way that you ll have a full appreciation for the techniques described in this book.

In order to do this, you ll need access to some serious hardware. The examples in this book were written and tested on a server that consisted of an Intel-based machine with a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2GB of RAM running Windows 2000 Service Pack 4. Every attempt was made to use the latest and greatest versions of the various pieces of software made available by Oracle. Not every patch was applied (an entire book could be written on that subject alone), but I tried to use my best judgment in determining whether a particular patch was essential or not. I accessed that machine by way of my laptop, which is a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM over an 802.11b wireless network. I was the only one on the server, so performance metrics are meaningless, but even when doing CPU and disk intensive activities in the background (like deploying an application or installing the ADF runtime files, both of which are described in Chapter 15), I was able to perform other actions (like editing Portal pages) with no discernable slowdown .

Experiment, play around, but most importantly, have fun!

Chris Ostrowski
Brad Brown
October 2004
orawebdev@tusc.com