Accessing Oracle through Web

If you have a large investment in Oracle, will be primarily accessing Oracle databases and have a staff proficient in PL/SQL, then Web System would be a good choice. I used 1.0 for about four months - Nov 95- Feb 96. I was disappointed that the majority of the effort of 2.0 was directed at secure transactions, rather than enhancing the functionality of the application language. There is no decent way to effectively debug PL/SQL apps. The dubugger product from Oracle was evaluated, but routinely crashed and ate code. Don't get me wrong, I am pro-Oracle, but I think the product needs to expand. On the other hand, it is a stable development environment, even with the debugging limitations.

If you want to perform relatively simple queries against an O database through a web interface, you might want to look at NT products like Cold Fusion or dbWeb. Cold Fusion will allow you to do more complex apps, where dbWeb is GUI driven and simple to use. Both have been on the market for almost a year and are pretty stable.

If you want to cut your teeth on a beta product, then check out Netscape's LiveWire. It's currently in beta3, with 1.0 supposed to be out around July. It is a fairly simple scripting language and continues to be enhanced. There is limited support through the developer newsgroups and you must be part of the development program. Access to Oracle and other databases is simple, but it is beta code and you have to be willing to deal with some of the rough edges.

Again it depends on your time tables and what sorts of information you are trying to provide.

Hope that helped.

Park Received on Tue May 07 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST