Oracle and Open Source

Chapter 6. Building Web-Based Oracle Applications

The world of web-based Oracle applications is bursting at the seams these days, with a well-rounded and growing list of tools ranging from snapshot-based performance monitoring tools and database administration gizmos to data browsing and remote online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.

What are web-based applications? We loosely define such applications as those whose output or interface is viewed through a web browser. Some of these applications are Perl-based CGI scripts; others are just SQL scripts whose output is HTML. Chapter 5, describes the fundamental technologies on which these applications are built. If you’ve read that chapter, you will have a solid foundation for understanding the web-based Oracle applications described in this chapter.

The advantage to employing a web solution is that you need to deploy it only once, at one web address, and thereby provide a tool that anyone with a web browser can access from anywhere on the network. This is a powerful application paradigm indeed, especially for busy administrators who may manage dozens of databases and who want to maintain a satellite’s-eye view of what’s going on. If you deploy over the Internet, as well as over your corporate intranet (with the appropriate security measures, of course), you’ll be able to administer your systems much more simply and effectively, especially if you’re away from your base system, need instant access, and sometimes have difficulty ...