Oracle Application Server Middle-Tier – Part I June 12, 2007
Posted by Manpreet Johal in Oracle Application Server.1 comment so far
All the way from WebDB to currently OracleAS 10g has matured enough and accomodated many components into its family. As I discussed in my earlier posts about OracleAS Overview and OracleAS Infrastructure, in this post I will be covering OracleAS Middle-Tier.
OracleAS Middle-Tier is a part of OracleAS 10g which serve as a application server, business-logic store, content caching server, web services directory, wireless access point for business applications, business process monitoring and business intelligence reporting tool.
It is having following components:
OracleAS Wireless: It serves as a wireless application store. We can deploy wireless-enabled J2EE applications which can be accessed from mobile devices.
OracleAS Portal: We can deploy web applications built using PL/SQL and J2EE. It provides integrated development environment known as Portal Builder.
Using Portal Builder, developers/end users can integrate the content from multiple sources e.g web feeds, web services, flat files, database tables and publish as portlets on a single page/multiple pages. Pages built in Portal can be configured to access via Mobile Devices as well.
OracleAS Portal stores its configuration and applications information in database store known as Portal Repository. Portal Repository by default is created in OracleAS Metadata Repository database, but can be stored in a separate database.
Oracle Components for J2EE (OC4J): Heart of OracleAS 10g. This component is providing a mechanism to deploy J2EE compliant applications at OracleAS 10g or you can say this framework is making OracleAS 10g J2EE compliant. Developers can deploy WAR, EAR files built using JDeveloper, Eclipse or any other J2EE compliant IDE.
OracleAS WebCache: It caches the static and dynamic content being served by OracleAS. It stores the cached content in memory and filesystem. Whenever end user accesses the OracleAS URLs, request goes to Web Cache. If Web Cache founds the content matching to user request in its cache, it will process the request and return the response to user browser. This concept is know as Cache Hit. If Web Cache didn’t find the content requested by user’s request in its cache, it will redirect the request to other OracleAS components, depending on type of request. This concept is known as Cache Miss.
