Oracle Web Applications: PL/SQL Developer's Intro

Chapter 2. Foundations

The ease with which you can develop applications on a PC has caused developers to pay far too little attention to the basic infrastructure in which the systems run. Developers often slap together a form, test it on a PC, and then roll it out to unsuspecting users. They fail to take into account that although they have tested the system on a LAN connection, users will use the system over a WAN connection. What seems fine in one setting is bad in another, and even the world’s greatest application really stinks if it’s deployed on an inappropriate infrastructure.

Understanding the implications of the infrastructure is even more important in web development, and your designs must account for differences between the major Internet networking protocols (especially statelessness, which we’ll look at shortly) and their client/server counterparts. Web systems are centered on a network, so you must account for network traffic in your designs. Even the way you connect your database to the Web has an important impact. You haven’t yet written a line of code and you’ve already got dozens of problems to work out.

This chapter lays the foundations for a WebDB or an OAS application. I’ll talk about these applications more specifically in Chapter 3, and Chapter 4.

Resources

An individual piece of content, whether it’s a human resources manual or a phone list, is a resource in web parlance. There are two broad classes of resources: static and dynamic. Static resources are ...