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Re: Development Trends in Web and Oracle

From: Joel Garry <joel-garry_at_home.com>
Date: 14 Mar 2005 16:02:05 -0800
Message-ID: <1110844925.696547.225670@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>

Noons wrote:

> You see, real life is ALWAYS different from case studies!
>

Huh, I always thought case studies were supposed to be from real life.

Anyways, I don't know jack about XML. But I have been subjected to it in real life, and this is what I've seen:

XML appears to be used to define things to middleware, like OAS <->http<->dbms. There winds up being strange performance results, things ocassionally taking a real long time for no apparent reason, and just generally being slow. As the man said, an impedence mismatch - but not going in and out of the database, but rather trying to map a necesity for transactions to a stateless architecture. With OAS10g, some architectural changes have been made; now you have to put stuff in the database, so you don't have to rely on links and public synonyms just to peruse data in the db. At least with the Portal implementation, this still is slow and cumbersome. Edit one .xml (or worse, push the wrong button in some GUI which suddenly, mysteriously and irreversably edits one .xml, without asking "OK?") and it all breaks.

Since that didn't work for a customer, they went with an IIS based middleware from the vendor that makes the app software - one of those db independent thingies that requires IIS. Now, the "old way" was a vendor supplied thin client that runs servers on the server to serve the clients. The "new way" is browser based, basically using similar servers to serve to the middle tier that creates web pages to browse to. Very cool actually, but one problem. The old way used security in the database together with security on the server (groups on unix, for example), to dynamically set up menus and such. The new way requires one to manually edit an XML file to create a proper menu on the middle tier for each group. Now obviously, one could make that dynamic too, but you would wind up with the mess Daniel described, right in the part users expect to be fast. So they're going to have to pay some XML hacker to code up a bunch of menus - I'm too expensive to do it (well, I don't think so, but there you go), and local staff is overburdened or not qualified to do it. The most telling observation was from a vendor consultant: "The XML is fragile."

[Note to Syltrem: GB 7.2 in production, it works scary fast!]

jg

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Received on Mon Mar 14 2005 - 18:02:05 CST

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