By Rachel Chalmers
Oracle Corp flagged its new XML infrastructure for e-business last week ahead of an Internet World launch (CI No 3,636). In retrospect, that may have been a tactical error. The database giant now says IBM’s Commerce Integrator announcement (see separate story) is just Big Blue’s reaction to the news.
Like IBM’s new product, the Oracle platform consists of a set of tools surrounding a message broker capable of handling asynchronous communication between applications. But Oracle says Commerce Integrator depends on IBM’s MQseries messaging, while its own software is compatible with MQseries, Tibco’s Tib/Rendezvous and its own Oracle 8i Advanced Query. We’re very agnostic about the messaging system that’s used, says VP of server marketing Jeremy Burton.
While IBM’s pre-emptive strike may have taken a little of the shine off Oracle’s day, the XML environment is not the database company’s only story. Oracle would also like us to know that Oracle 8i has considerable XML capabilities of its own. A parser converts XML documents back into data for storage. Great as XML is, Burton warns, data should only stay in XML documents as long as it absolutely has to. After use, it should be put back into the database, where it’s far more ordered and more easily manageable. As an added bonus, Oracle gets to keep selling databases instead of having to find another business.
The company would also like to make it crystal clear that contrary to popular perception, its Oracle Application Server (OAS) has a distinct road map. Instead of being the key to portable application programming, Java has made fools of the pundits by becoming the tool of choice for server-side business logic.
Accordingly, OAS now supports Enterprise Java Beans, servlets and Java server pages, the last of which Sun Microsystems is pushing as an alternative to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages. The killer interface on the client side has turned out to be HTML, because as Burton says, Where the internet has played bigtime is that everyone feels they can use it.
Finally, Burton says the raw iron buzzword is rapidly becoming manifest in an Oracle 8i appliance. Hardware partners signed up to date include Hewlett-Packard, Siemens and – interestingly – Dell, with a fourth partner expected to be announced any day now. Half of our customer base runs dedicated database servers, Burton observes. That makes the appliance model look like something of a no-brainer. If the partners – and especially Dell – can make it work, look to others – and especially Compaq – to jump on the bandwagon. Like IBM, they might even claim it was their idea all along.
