Re: Please help

Donald King wrote in message <3574DE7F.6A09_at_cjnetworks.com>...
>My organization is a state agency. We are planning on developing and
>deploying a web-centric application that will serve as an information
>system with a central data repository being housed within our agency.

I assume that you're excluding hardware from this quote. And as you have not specified the operating system, I assume that you want to use either NT or Unix.

>We are going to have 8
>developers working on the project using designer 2000 and/or the web
>development suite. Now I understand that this software can be expensive
>but after figuring up the developer licenses and the server licenses
>(web server and applications server) the total shocked me. It was
>nearly $280,000 dollars for the software alone!

Geez, this seems to be way over what I would have expected. Quite likely they (the scum of the earth, also known as sales people) have calculated into the price 2,000 client licences to allow acess to Oracle via the Web Server. Typical. They will try and screw you anyway they can. And if any of you sales people read this and have a bone to pick, pissoff and leave this technical conferences to us techies.

OK, with the rant out of the way, here's my 2'c worth.

First clarify the licensing issue. What you have is a single client (i.e. the Web Server) accessing the Oracle database, BUT this Web Server can serve up to 2,000 clients. How many concurrent web/oracle users do you expect? Let's say you have at max 10 web browsers at the same moment hitting the HTTP post/get button to submit or request data, you will have (to be fair IMHO) pay for 10 client licences at least.

Secondly, you need to decide on the platform. If you go for Unix, you will either have to buy a 3rd party Web Server like Apache or Netscape, or include Oracle's Web Server into Oracle Server bundle you need to buy. If you're going Windows-NT, Microsoft's Web Server is already bundled with the operating system. Oh yes, Netscape seems to be doing the same now. You get a bundled (but limited licence) version of Netscape's Fast Track Server when you purchase certain Unix operating systems.

Either way, you are not restricted in buying Oracle's Web Server as part of your Oracle purchase. Check out the operating system bundled software - it may well be cheaper getting a web server that way. Also, IMHO, I found Netscape and Microsoft's web servers more stable and robust than Oracle's Web Server. May be an unfair comment as I base this on my experiences with the old v2.0 web server - I have not use Oracle latest web server.

Development tools. Why do you need Developer-2000? Talking under correction, but I don't believe this to be a tool that fully support developing web based applications. I will not recommend going the Java route - to complex and not really required the way I understand the real estate agency web requirements. I would suggest standard HTML using POST and/or GET instead. This means using either CGI type interfaces to the database (e.g. Perl), or developing software for the proprietary web CGI-based interfaces (e.g. NSAPI, ISAPI etc.). I don't see where Developer-2000 feature in this development architecture.

Another alternative is of course to use server-side scripting functionality instead of either Java or CGI, something like ASP (Active Server Pages) for example. This often is the easiest solution, but a very proprietary one.

So in the end what do you need to purchase? Oracle Server with 10 to 20 user licenses - and that's it IMHO. In addition get yourself a web server using the operating system bundle to lessen the cost of the web server. Then you need development tools - and that depends on how you select to design and deploy your web-based application.

regards,
Billy Received on Thu Jun 04 1998 - 06:44:04 CDT