Re: Oracle Webserver Experiences

In <summersd.59.0014500A_at_teleport.com>, summersd_at_teleport.com (David Summers) writes:
>I am interested hearing from anyone actually using the Oracle Webserver
>(preferablythe new 2.0 version).If we buy it, will we wish we had come up with
>another solution? We are being led to believe that a major advantage is the
>ability to call PL/SQL directly and avoid overhead. Is this reality or
>'market-speak'?

I haven't gotten to the point of measuring overhead or lack thereof yet, but I believe the other claims about the advantages of calling PL/SQL directly are not overstated. I've just been dipping into the 90-day trial version of the 1.0 WebServer for NT and I have to say I'm very impressed with the package (other than a minor problem running any of the 16-bit Windows database utilities) in general, and with many of the specifics I've come across so far. The whole PL/SQL-dynamic HTML generation thing looks very nice and I think we'll be able to do some exciting things with it.

As far as overhead, I've come across one reference in the online "glossies" that claims lower overhead than using CGI, while another reference in the documentation itself states that OWA (Oracle Web Agent, the entity which connects the database server (and thus PL/SQL) and the WebServer) actually works as or using a CGI interface. If CGI itself is inherently inefficient, therefore, the docs imply that OWA can do no better.

I rather suspect CGI itself is fine but calling out to external routines is typically slow, whereas PL/SQL (cached in SGA) and direct database access let you do certain things far faster and a whole lot easier.

There are two demo applications (HR tool and a travel thing) and upon examining the source code one finds almost no trace of HTML itself -- it's all handled by well-designed library routines available for your own stuff. Nice. Part of one demo app checks what browser you are calling with and efficiently customizes the results based on abilities known to be in certain browsers. I'm only just starting to dream of all the neat stuff we can do with this sort of flexibility.

 Peter HANSEN                                     Engenuity Corporation
 peter_at_engcorp.com                              Guelph, Ontario, Canada