Oracle Containers For J2EE (OC4J)

Oracle Containers For J2EE (OC4J)

One of the reasons I am writing today’s post on Oracle Container For J2EE is that apart from being a core component of the 10g Application Server Oracle Containers For J2EE is also an important member of the new Oracle Applications Release 12 Tech Stack.

Oracle Containers For J2EE or commonly referred to as OC4J is the underlying runtime engine for the 10g Application Server infrastructure. It is an extremely lightweight and easy to install component which requires less than 50 MB of disk space and 20 MB of your server memory to be up and running. It also has a support for a wide range of operating systems including NT, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, IBM-AIX and Compaq True 64 with support for both 32 and 64 bit operating system.

OC4J runs on the Java 1.4 virtual machine and is J2EE 1.3 complaint. You can have multiple OC4J process running each of which is referred to as a OC4J instance. The OC4J configuration is controlled via XML configuration files and OC4J properties file. An OC4J instance is referred to as a container as it provides a web container to support services like Java Server Pages(JSP),Servlets , Enterprise Java Beans(EJB) and Web Services.

The OC4J also implements the following J2EE services.

• Java Authentication And Authorization Service (JAAS)
• Java API for XML Parsing (JAXP)
• J2EE Connector (J2C)
• Java Mail
• Java Naming and Directory Interface(JNDI)
• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
• Java Application Framework(JAF)
• Java Transaction API (JTA)
• Java Messaging Service (JMS)

High Availability Single Sign On and SOA

OC4J can also be configured to support High availability architectures with Oracle RDBMS using Real Application Clusters and Oracle Datagaurd Technologies.OC4J also supports the Single Sign On functionality by making use of the JAAS service. OC4J is also out of the box Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) compliant as it supports the underlying feature of persistence.

Deployment

Though I am mostly talking about OC4J as a component of the Oracle Application Server, its important to note here that it comes as a standalone java component as well in the form a single zip file. Both the standalone distribution and the Application server distribution are developer friendly and deployment friendly. The code deployment in OC4J is done
through a Enterprise Archive File (EAR). The EAR file contains the Web Archive (WAR file) which in turn encapsulates the Java Archive (JAR) files containing the code.

OC4J In Oracle Applications

OC4J replaces the Jserv component which is there in the current release 11i of Oracle Applications. Also as a result the mod_jserv component would be replaced by the mod_oc4j component in release 12 of Oracle Applications. The mod_oc4j is used to communicate between different OC4J instances.

The default installation Release 12 of Oracle Applications will create 3 OC4J instances

• Oacore: This runs the OA Framework-based applications.
• Forms: This runs the Forms-based applications.
• OAFM: This is responsible for running the web services.

The Jserv groups which are there current in Oracle Applications Release 11i are also planned be replaced by OC4J instances.

As mentioned earlier the OC4J properties are controlled using the XML files and OC4J.properties file. These files are managed by the standard Oracle Applications Autoconfig.

The Java code deployment in Oracle E-Business suite for OC4J is done at the time of install using rapid install and maintained by ad tools like adadmin and adpatch. New custom code deployment can be done by using the Application Server Control user interface.

The OC4J implementation in Oracle Applications Release 12 will include the following directory structure.

• applications: Contains applications deployed
• applications-deployment: Contains configuration settings for the applications deployed
• config: Contains common configuration setting for the OC4J instance.

Native Sun Plug-In to Replace Jinitiator in E-Business Suite Release 12

E-Business Suite Release 12 will replace Oracle JInitiator with the native Sun Java2 Standard Edition (J2SE).

[More cheering from Oracle Apps DBAs, Business Analysts and Users]

As most of you know, Oracle JInitiator is an authorised version of Sun Microsystems' Java2 Standard Edition with some specific fixes required to support Oracle Forms. JInitiator is currently required to run Oracle Forms in the E-Business Suite Release 11i, although Oracle is apparently running an Early Adopter Program that's evaluating the feasibility of eliminating this requirement for Release 11i.

Oracle JInitiator will no longer be required to run Oracle Forms in E-Business Suite Release 12. Oracle Forms in Release 12 will run directly in the native Sun Java2 Standard Edition plug-in. This will be the standard configuration for Release 12.

Related Articles:
Replacing Oracle JInitiator with Sun's Native Plug-In

Process Management in Release 12

Oracle executives have been devoting a lot of slides in recent customer briefings to Oracle BPEL Process Manager: it's the cornerstone for our corporate integration strategy. This begs the obvious question: what's going to be included in Release 12?

Workflow in Release 12

The Rapid Install for Release 12 will include Oracle Workflow out-of-the-box. At present, Oracle expect that the version included will be Workflow 2.6, but as always, this is subject to change.

The practical implication of including Workflow in Release 12 is that all of your existing customized workflows will continue to function with minimal disruption and effort if you're upgrading from Release 11i.

Optional R12 Integration with BPEL Process Manager

If you're excited about working with BPEL Process Manager, you'll have the option of doing that, too.



Given that the E-Business Suite provides standard SOA web services, all that you'll need to do is to install OracleAS 10g and and BPEL Process Manager on a separate instance and point it to business service endpoints available from the E-Business Suite Release 12.

Getting Started with BPEL Process Manager and Release 11i

The BPEL Process Manager is considered a standalone tool outside of the E-Business Suite space, so you don't need to wait until Release 12. You can use BPEL Process Manager and other Oracle Integration connectors with Release 11i today. That's a good way of getting a headstart if you plan to upgrade to the combination of Release 12 and BPEL Process Manager in the future, or if you'd like to kick the tires and take this for a test drive today.

Encrypting Traffic Between 11i Application and Database Tiers

It's now possible to encrypt the SQL*Net traffic that flows between the E-Business Suite Release 11i application and database tier servers.

This long-awaited certification is delivered through an Oracle database feature called Oracle Advanced Security Option (ASO). For reasons too arcane to discuss here, this is also referred to as Advanced Networking Option (ANO).

The process involves installing an E-Business Suite Concurrent Manager patch and Oracle Advanced Networking, changing several configuration files, and then relinking your Apps executables.

The minimum prerequisites for this configuration include:

• Oracle Applications 11.5.10 users with RUP 3 or later (11i.ATG.PF.H RUP3 patch 4334965 or later)

Negligible Impact on Performance

According to the E-Business Suite Performance Group, the overhead is approximately 5%, mainly due to an increase in round-trips and payload size as well as some trivial amount of packet processing when ASO is enabled.

For the security-conscious, this overhead is a small price to pay for the added security for encrypting this sensitive traffic.

Related
Encrypting EBS 11i Network Traffic using Advanced Security Option / Advanced Networking Option (Note 391248.1)

Cloning OracleAS 10g + E-Business Suite Environments

Cloning an E-Business Suite environment is easy. Cloning an E-Business Suite environment that's been integrated with Oracle Application Server 10g is not quite as easy, unfortunately.

What's Cloning?

Cloning is the process of creating an identical copy of an already existing Oracle Applications system, including both the application-tier and database-tier.

Why Clone?

Reasons for cloning E-Business Suite environments include:

• Creating a copy of the production system for testing updates
• Migrating an existing system to new hardware
• Creating a stage area to reduce patching downtime

One of our more risk-averse customers informed me that they may create up to 15 clones of an E-Business Suite environment between the TEST and PRODUCTION rollout phases.

The Easy Part

The E-Business Suite Release 11i was architected to support cloning. Experienced Apps DBAs know that the easiest way to create clones of their environments is to use the Rapid Clone utility introduced in 11.5.8. Creating a n E-Business Suite clone is as simple as copying your application-tier and database-tier files to the new target system and then running the perl-based Rapid Clone (adcfgclone.pl) utility.

The Not-So Easy Part

Oracle Application Server 10g was designed with different goals in mind. Consequently, there are no Oracle tools available today to clone an entire OracleAS 10g environment in a single step. In other words, OracleAS 10g does not have the equivalent of a Rapid Clone utility.

In the absence of a single turnkey tool like Rapid Clone, creating clones of new OracleAS 10g environments is a more involved process. Not impossible, mind you -- but definitely more involved.

Things get even more complicated when an E-Business Suite environment is integrated with Oracle Application Server 10g.

Nothing But Net

There are neither tools nor formal documents available from the Applications Technology Group or from Application Server Development, for cloning E-Business Suite environments that have been integrated with OracleAS 10g.

In short, there are no tools available to meet the comprehensive cloning requirements for combined OracleAS 10g + E-Business Suite environments today.

Warning: Trail Ahead Requires Exploration

If you're willing to experiment a bit, the following are general guidelines to point you in the right direction. Some customers and Oracle Consultants have used the following approaches to get the job done but have reported that there was some trial-and-error involved.

These are neither detailed nor comprehensive instructions. The following should be attempted only by system administrators who have a solid understanding of the principles outlined in Metalink Note 261914.1.

Cloning Scenarios

Assuming that you have an E-Business Suite environment that's been successfully integrated with OracleAS 10g, here are a few cloning scenarios that may apply to you:

1. Create a clone of your Discoverer environment
   
2. Create a clone of your Single Sign-On / Oracle Internet Directory environment
   
3. Create a clone of your Portal environment

Creating a Clone of Your Discoverer 10g Environment

If you've integrated Discoverer 10g with your E-Business Suite environment but have not chosen the Single Sign-On option, then the cloning process is relatively painless:

1. Use Rapid Clone to create a clone of your E-Business Suite, including the application-tier and database-tier. Remember that the E-Business Suite database already contains the Discoverer 10g End-User Layer.
   
2. Create a fresh install of Discoverer 10g on your new server and point it to the End-User Layer in the cloned E-Business Suite instance.

Creating a Clone of Your Single Sign-On / Oracle Internet Directory Environment

If you've integrated Single Sign-On and Oracle Internet Directory 10g with your E-Business Suite environment, do the following:

1. Use Rapid Clone to create a clone of your E-Business Suite, including the application-tier and database-tier.
   
2. In your newly-cloned E-Business Suite instance, set the APPS_SSO_LDAP_SYNC profile option to "Disabled" at the site level (since there's no new Oracle Internet Directory instance to synchronize with yet).
   
3. In your newly-cloned E-Business Suite instance, unlink all E-Business Suite users that were linked to the original Oracle Internet Directory 10g users (i.e. where FND_USER.USER_GUID is populated), since the those old links are no longer valid. Those E-Business Suite users will need to be linked to their corresponding accounts in the as-yet non-existent new Oracle Internet Directory instance.
   
4. Create a fresh install of Single Sign-On and Oracle Internet Directory 10g on your new server.
   
5. Assuming that you enabled bidirectional provisioning between the E-Business Suite and Oracle Internet Directory, do one of the following (but not all three):
   
   a) Redo your bulkload from the E-Business Suite into Oracle Internet Directory, reregister your E-Business Suite environment using the Bidirectional Provisioning Profile, and enable the APPS_SSO_AUTO_LINK_USER profile option, and set the profile option APPS_SSO_LDAP_SYNC back to Enabled at site level.
   
   b) Export your LDAP namespace from your original Oracle Internet Directory instance into an LDIF file, and then import the LDIF file into the new Oracle Internet Directory instance. Reregister your E-Business Suite environment using the Bidirectional Provisioning Profile, and (assuming that the Oracle Internet Directory accounts are identical to the E-Business Suite accounts) enable the APPS_SSO_AUTO_LINK_USER profile option, and set the profile option APPS_SSO_LDAP_SYNC back to Enabled at site level.
   
   c) Connect the original Oracle Internet Directory instance to your new Oracle Internet Directory instance via a connector, synchronizing the namespaces. Reregister your E-Business Suite environment using the Bidirectional Provisioning Profile, and (assuming that the Oracle Internet Directory accounts are identical to the E-Business Suite accounts) enable the APPS_SSO_AUTO_LINK_USER profile option, and set the profile option APPS_SSO_LDAP_SYNC back to Enabled at site level.
   

Creating a Clone of Your Portal Environment

1. Portal requires a working Single Sign-On setup, so complete the previous section first.
   
2. If you haven't already done so, create a fresh install of Portal 10g on your new server.
   
3. Use the existing Portal 10g documentation to export your portal content and metadata from the original Portal instance. Import that content into the new Portal 10g instance.
   
4. Reregister the OAF Web Provider from your new E-Business Suite instance in your new Portal instance.

Portal 10.1.4 Certified for the E-Business Suite

Oracle Portal 10.1.4 has just been certified with the E-Business Suite Release 11i.

There are a number of interesting new features in Portal 10.1.4, including the Oracle Portlet Factory, JSR-168 and WSRP support, Struts support, BPEL integration, a new Instant Portal, and others.

The Portal 10.1.4 certification with the E-Business Suite requires the latest Oracle Applications Framework Web Provider, which might lead to other prerequisites such as Applications Technology Group (ATG) Family Pack H Rollup 4 (11i.ATG_PF.H RUP 4, Patch 4676589). Other prerequisites will depend on your existing configuration. I'd recommend reviewing the documentation below carefully.

References:

• Using Oracle Portal 10g with Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (Note 305918.1)
• In-Depth: Using Portal 10g with the E-Business Suite
• Upgrade To Version 10.1.4 (OTN)
  

XML Publisher

Introducing Data Templates

Here is a reproduced article written by Tim Dexter - XML Publisher Development. I have been waiting for this since XML Publisher was first released!

"Another series of articles on the way ... this time concerning the relatively new data extraction engine from XML Publisher that is currently available in the Enterprise and E Business Suite flavors.

First a little history ...

Why build another extraction tool, there are others that can generate XML, Oracle Reports, various solutions from the database folks, the list goes on. To answer why you have to understand the volumes of data we are trying to handle here and the future of reporting for Oracle Applications. For EBS in particular we had multiple reporting solutions, the majority of which were based on Oracle Reports. The plan going forward is to remove Oracle Reports from the techstack in the fusion timeframe. Therefore we needed an extraction engine that offered all that Oracle Reports offers and was just as fast - Oracle Reports is danged fast at generating XML data. On top of that we are not talking about extracting data for a 2 page invoice, the engine needs to extract millions of rows to build tens of thousands of pages for some reports.
We looked at what was out there, SQL XML provided fast extraction for large data sets but we needed among others, event triggers and flexfield user exits, plus users would need to learn the wrapper functions used to generate the hierarchies. After a lot of research we decided to build an engine ourselves with all the bells and whistles needed to cover the Oracle Reports replacement requirements.

Features ... features ... features

To dig in a little to the features the engine provides:

Fast, scalable extractions - its fast, faster than Oracle Reports. We worked closely with the Oracle Performance team and had to re-write it a couple of times to get their approval. It needs to be fast too, those of you that use Oracle Reports EBS know that out of the box we generate flat text character based output. With XMLP we're generating high fidelity output ... that requires more processing time so the more time we save on the extraction the more we have for formatting without slowing the report generation.

Oracle Reports Features - if its going to replace OR in EBS then it has to match OR on features:

• Multiple Queries/Joins - enabling master/detail extractions
• Event Triggers - pre- and post- fetch for business rule processing. Currently plsql support but will add java
• Flexfield Support - gotta get that natural account description with out the select statement - this is an EBS feature.
• Formula/summary columns - again similar to Oracle Report functionality allowing you to create aggregation values and pl/sql based formula columns in your extraction
• Data Structure - this allows you to build a hierarchy into your XML data similar to the grouping abilities in Oracle Reports
• Group filters - a la Oracle Reports
• etc

on top of that its also has:

• Rich Java API layer - call a data template from your jsp or java app
• Distributed Queries - this is neat. You're not tied to a single db nor even to an Oracle db. You can construct a data template that, for example hits an MSSQL instance for customer data and an Oracle db for their invoices. the engine will generate a single result set of hierarchical XML i.e. Customer1
  Invoice1
  Invoice2
  Customer2
  Invoice1
  Invoice2
  
• Static XML File support - query across a db and an XML file. Text and XLS support coming.
• Pluggable Data Templates - not here yet but the idea here is that you can build a core data template and then allow a plugin DT to be applied over the top to get more data from other sources.

Some of you will have wondered what the heck a Data Template is? this is the name we give to the extraction definition, its an XML representation of the queries, joins, data structure, etc."

General direction for BI Suite SE and EE

Here are some highlights from the Open World session. I've also linked to photos of the slides if you're interested in how it was all presented:

• The release schedule for BI Suite EE is firstly to release version 10.1.2.2, with support for user-defined custom members and new graph styles, and then the 10.2.3 release which has support for enhanced custom members. The 11g release will then feature JSR-168 portal integration, integration with BI Suite EE Answers, Dashboards and Delivers, and will come with migration utilties and methodologies to support moves to BI Suite EE.
• Discoverer customers will have three options going forward: to stay with Discoverer indefinitely, to stay with Discoverer but take advantage of EE features such as Dashboard and Delivers, or to migrate to EE. Migration is optional though and there's no compulsion.
• The forthcoming "Maui" release of BI Suite EE has 200 new features including Oracle OLAP integration, RSS feeds, Linux support and 64-bit support.
• The new Maui release (10gR3 V10.1.3.2)'s 200 new features can be categorised into six areas: firstly Lower cost of setup & administration, analytic server enhancements and dashboard and reports enhancements, and secondly Fusion Middleware integration, Oracle DBMS & OLAP integration and Security enhancements (see slides for more details), and
• The 11g release ("Negril") will feature enhancements around the Analytic Server, dashboards, better OTLP and BI integration, and support for MS Office 12.

BI Suite EE - Some Key Points

• The key differentiator for BI Suite EE is it's model-driven approach, which helps minimise requirements suprises as you develop the application
• BI EE handles large data volumes through function shipping to the back-end DW database or OLAP server, rather than creating it's internal data stores and trying to scale those
• The model-driven approach makes early prototyping easier - prototyping rather than a long requirements-writing process is the preferred development method, with a fully-functional prototype featuring role-based dashboards being delivered at the end
• A typical BI EE project would involve the prototyping/requirements gathering phase, a performance tuning phase, regression testing and subsequent projects/iteration
• When you build the Common Enterprise Information Model, make sure detail-level transaction data is kept in separate subject areas to aggregate, summary data, as mixing the two creates unusable presentation catalogs and bad query performance
• Although BI EE supports the integration of data across data sources, this shouldn't be used as a way of creating a virtual data warehouse (EII) - this just doesn't work.
• Understand the semantics of fact-based partitioning and logical table sources - by default every measure is a separate query block, but coalescing measure mappings in a single logical table source allows you to optimize by coalescing measures to reduce the number of queries
• When implementing BI EE, resist the urge to rebuild the source data warehouse - instead create a handful of aggregates to speed up the slowest report, migrate these eventually to the source warehouses, use the caching and aggregate navigation features of EE to speed up the warehouse in-place.
• When building analytics catalogs, keep to no more than seven top-level folders and seven columns per folder, minimize detailed columns (use navigation to access these instead), focus on adding measures and cross-fact calculations - this is where the value of EE is achieved, and use consistent order and naming - dimension folders at the top, measures at the bottom, and measure folders are named specifically so that end-users can distinguish between dims and measures.

Oracle BI & SOA - Hype or Here Now?

BI is positioned very much within the Fusion Middleware stack of products, alongside areas such as identity management, as one of the key pillars of the platform, and many of the BI Suite Enterprise Edition talks made reference to how the suite played well with SOA-enabled applications. So what does this mean then, in practical terms, for Discoverer, Warehouse and Oracle OLAP developers? Is it just another architecture, or does this represent a step-change in the way we put BI applications together?

As a basic starter, a Service Orientated Architecture is an application architecture that makes use of loosely-coupled, self-describing web-based components that can be accessed by a calling application without any knowledge needed of the way in which they are implemented. Like previous component architectures used when building VB, C++ or Java applications, you can call published components and work with the results, except in the SOA world there's no need for the calling application and the components being used to be built using the same technology; you just register the components using something called a broker, your calling application then checks in with the broker, establishes what services are available and what parameters they require, then makes use of them as desired.

What we're doing then is building an application architecture at the macro, rather than the micro, level. It's evolutionary, rather than a complete new way of doing things - components and object-orientated programming have been around for a while now, but the difference here is that by integrating at the published, standards-based interface level, you can string applications together that draw on functionality from all sorts of systems, even where you have no idea as to how they were implemented.

Apart from the loosely-coupled integration factor, another key feature is that these services can be "orchestrated" - the analogy here is with Oracle Workflow, but Oracle Workflow generally works with PL/SQL components only whereas SOA orchestration, using BPEL (Business Process Orchestration Language), is implementation-independent and a standard across the industry. As well as BPEL, another acronym is ESB, or "Enterprise Service Bus" - a communications layer that takes messages from one SOA component to another, queues them and ensures their delivery.

So, where's the relevance for business intelligence and data warehousing? Here are some recent articles on the subject:

• What Do SOA and ESB Mean in Business Intelligence - Colin White
• What Does Software as a Service Mean for Business Intelligence - Colin White
• What Does Web 2.0 Mean to the Enterprise - Colin White
• Integrating Business Intelligence into the Collaborative Workground Environment - Colin White
• Business Intelligence and SOA - Robin Mulkers
• Why SOA is Important to Your BI Solutions - Colin Hulford
• OTN Service-Orientated Architecture Technology Center

Reading through these, it seems that the major areas of impact for business intelligence are:

1. Exposing ETL functionality as a service, having these routines transform data coming into a warehouse in real-time and in such a way that they can be called by any sort of application
2. Surfacing analytics, reports, dashboards and so on generated by SOA-compliant BI tools within line-of-business applications, and
3. Using the scalability of these loosely-coupled applications to create bigger and better BI applications that are quicker to respond to new data sources, new business opportunities and new ways of analyzing data.
4. BI has to become pervasive, user-friendly and as easy to use as Google Search.

So, getting back to the real world, what does this mean for us? Well, my initial thoughts are along these lines:

• Our ETL tools need to be able to consume, and produce, web services, and work in real-time, so that they can provide the data formatting and transformation facilities required in an SOA environment. This is a step-change beyond the "flat files and database links" that we're currently used to with OWB, and we're going to have to get used to writing ETL routines that are fast, can be run on-demand as opposed to in a batch, and are more about interfaces and standards than automatically assuming we're working with Oracle-only data.
• The analytics generated by our BI tools need to be made pervasive - it's no longer enough to provide a standalone client-server or web-based query tool; we need this tool to make it's insights available, again through web services, to all sorts of applications, so that for example a real-time prediction, or a visualisation showing a customer opportunity, is as likely to be shown in a call centre application as in a dedicated BI dashboard.
• We have to build our data architectures in a way that makes them quick to respond to changes in the data landscape; no more three months to load a new data source via OWB into a data warehouse, we need the data in now, integrated and presented in such a way as to immediately be relevant
• We need to get away from crosstabs, dedicated BI tools that need a week's training to master, and present just the insights people need to do their jobs directly in the applications they work with.

In terms of real-world specifics, my predictions in terms of Oracle BI embracing SOA include:

1. Much more emphasis on BI's place in Fusion Middleware - more emphasis on identity management, more emphasis on interoperability, such that all major new features in Oracle BI (especially Discoverer, OWB) are centred around SOA-interoperability and enabling their use in this new architecture.
2. A very strong emphasis on the technologies now available through the Sunopsis purchase. Sunopsis Data Conductor ticks all the right boxes in terms of SOA-enablement, process orchestration, being platform agnostic and so on. OWB will still be important, but in the world of SOA, Sunopsis will be the key ETL technology.
3. BPEL will be the key workflow technology, replacing Workflow as the way you string together ETL tasks and business processes.
4. BI Suite Enterprise Edition will be the key BI technology, with analytics then being surfaced through traditional dashboards but more increasingly, directly through the Fusion line of business applications
5. The new Real-Time Decisions product will be the key to delivering real-time analyics, and automated decisions, through this architecture
6. OWB will take on more SOA-type features over time; already you can consume a web service through a PL/SQL routine, it's only a small step to publish OWB mappings or processes as web services through a PL/SQL wrapper
7. Web services will increasingly be used to expose Discoverer functionality to other applications
8. In the Oracle BI world, it'll increasingly be about working in heterogeneous environments - Oracle will still hopefully be the centre of the BI world, and will individually have the best features, but it'll play well with other applications and BI solutions developed using Oracle tools will be designed as data source and visualisation technology agnostic

So, it looks like interesting times. Going back to my original question - hype or here now? - I'd say I'm coming down on the "here now" camp. Certainly if you're a partner, or a customer, this is the conversation Oracle and it's competitors are having with their customers, so by definition it's here now.

In terms of Oracle's products, SOA is definitely here in terms of the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition, Fusion Middleware and Sunopsis Data Conductor; it's not such an easy fit when you come to the traditional tools - but I guess that's not a bad thing; if you're after a fairly straightforward, tactical solution, and you're primarily working with Oracle technology, then Standard Edition and OWB are the best fit.

If, however, you've seen the possibilities when it comes to Oracle's middleware platform and the new SOA paradigm, well it just so turns out that Oracle may have the products to make it all work. Interesting times indeed.

How to start up Oracle E-Business Suite in Firefox

If Firefox complains about a missing plugin when starting up Oracle E-Business Suite, here is what you need to do to make it work, assuming you have JInitiator installed in C:\Program Files\Oracle\ and Firefox installed in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\:

Copy

C:\Program Files\Oracle\JInitiator 1.1.8.16\bin\NPJinit-11816.dll

To

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins

The 11816 in NPJinit-11816.dll is the JInitiator version. You may have a different version.

Diving Deep Into the Release 12 Techstack

Diving Deep Into the Release 12 Techstack

The deep innards of the Release 12 technology stack....

For the most comprehensive preview released so far on how the Release 12 technology stack will be architected and work, take a look at this presentation:

Deep Dive: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 New Technology Stack (PDF, 520K.)
(Username: cboracle, Password: oraclec6 to download)

Areas covered:

• Highlights of new R12 techstack components
• New Application Server 10g (10.1.2 & 10.1.3) ORACLE_HOMEs replacing the 9iAS 1.0.2.2.2 O_HOMEs from 11i
• Switch from JServ to Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) for running servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP), and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)
• OC4J Deployment details, including replacements for jserv.conf and jserv.properties configuration files
  
• New R12 filesystem layout, including the introduction of an Instance Home (INST_TOP)
• New use of Oracle Process Manager & Notification Server (OPMN)
  
• New Forms 10g deployment
  
• Comparison of 11i and R12 environment variables
  
• Discussion of relative benefits of Forms Servlet vs. Server (socket) mode deployments
• Disabled mod_plsql in R12 (more about this in a later article)
  
• Things you can do today to prepare for R12