Chapter 1. Introduction
Since it burst on the scene in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web has transformed from a way (to quote Homer Simpson) to “let us know some nerd’s opinion on Star Trek” to a whole new way of doing business. Hardly an area in the information technology industry has been unaffected. Developers who only yesterday were using COBOL to write accounts payable systems are now being asked to create a broad range of new Internet-based applications, including electronic commerce (e-commerce) web sites, internal data warehouses, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Unfortunately, the filesystem architecture of most web systems is beginning to show its age. The new breed of web application, which is quickly becoming critical to companies’ survival, demands a platform that provides production-quality tools for content management, application development, and application integration.
The new release of the Oracle database, Oracle8i, attempts to meet these and other objectives by building web technology on top of a relational database system, rather than on a filesystem. This type of development enables companies to apply well-understood, reliable, production-quality database methodologies to web content management. Oracle8i also supports a wide variety of application development platforms and tools that are tightly integrated to the core database. Finally, Oracle8i supports technologies that help you tie your web-based systems to legacy applications.
In this ...
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