Oracle Web Applications: PL/SQL Developer's Intro

A Roadmap to Oracle8i

There’s way too much new stuff to learn! You could spend the rest of your life—including the additional 100 years you’ll get because of Y2K—learning the technologies listed in Table 1.2 and still not master them all. Oracle Corporation is far ahead of most of us; we’re lucky if we can keep our existing production systems running, much less learn dozens of new tools and methodologies.

Given the increasing importance of the Internet, though, we need development skills that we can use right now, not in the distant future. Additionally, some sites, for one reason or another, haven’t even moved from Oracle version 7.3 (or even 7.0) to Oracle8, much less Oracle8i. What are they supposed to do?

In this section I’ll suggest an approach to building web applications for Oracle8i that you can learn in just a week or two, even if you currently know nothing about the Web and even if you’re still using Oracle7. Everything I’ll cover will migrate smoothly to Oracle8i. In this way, you’ll have time to start learning the other technologies even as you develop new systems. The approach I suggest here uses a subset of the technologies listed in Table 1.2: OAS, WebDB, HTML, PL/SQL, and XML. I’ll also tell you why I think Java should be your second step.

Connect the Database to the Web Using OAS or WebDB

The first thing you’ll need to do is connect the Oracle database to the Web. The simplest way to do this is to use either OAS or WebDB. Both products work with Oracle 7.3 or above. ...