Database giant's Network Computing Architecture makes it a real player in the intranet
Henry Kissinger writes persuasively in his book Diplomacy about the end of the Cold War and its impact on the next century. The following decades will not revolve around the competing visions of two superpowers, but rather will wander among the shifting alliances between a great number of less dominant powers. The coming era will be different from the present one, and so will be the nations that define it.
None of the most important countries that must build a new world order have any experience with the emerging multistate system. Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale.
Similarly, in the first year of the commercial Internet, all eyes have been on Netscape and Microsoft, and the market has revolved around the competing visions of these two superpowers. The next few years, however, will be different. In the first year After Internet (AI), most major technology companies have gotten their Internet acts together. The software world has changed from a monopoly to a cold war, and is moving towards a multistate or Kieretsu period with astonishing speed.
This Kieretsu period places new demands on competitive strategy. Microsoft has not had any serious competitors in desktop operating systems since the introduction of the Macintosh in the mid-1980s. It has had no major competitor in desktop languages or applications for five years. Netscape had very little serious competition in browsers until Internet Explorer 3.0. Both companies are excellent competitors with superb technology. However, the world to come is more like diplomacy than boxing. And what is diplomacy? Simply the continuation of war by means that are equally dangerous but much more subtle.
After 10 long years of struggle with Sybase, Informix, IBM, and Ingres, Oracle understands how to thrive in an intensely competitive software market where conflict and diplomacy are inextricably woven. Oracle has established itself as a technological powerhouse rivaled only by Microsoft and IBM. However, like IBM, Oracle’s true strength lies in transforming its technological prowess into customer success. In the Internet, that transformation is called Network Computing Architecture (NCA), and it may well be the best strategy for prevailing in the Internet’s Kieretsu period.
Network Computing Architecture
NCA is a comprehensive vision not only of how Internet technologies mesh, but how customers can use them to solve business problems. As such, NCA is a unifying framework that allows the different worlds of client/server, the Web, and N-tier object computing to share a common computing model based on standards. NCA also leverages the best of each technology and integrates it into a whole. It also is quite a bit more than just elegant marketecture. The center of the universe in most corporations is a database and the information contained in it. NCA is unabashedly database-centric, and its greatest value lies in making data and services available as widely and as conveniently as possible.
The principal building blocks of NCA are standard clients, pluggable components, common services, common management tools, and a sophisticated mechanism for inter-component communication. The most innovative features of the architecture are its Universal Application Server and compatible components (or cartridges), a software bus (or backplane) for inter-component communications, and a set of shared services.
Oracle’s Universal Application Server is a middle-tier platform for linking Web servers to applications and databases. The Application Server is designed to dynamically generate HTML-formatted data in real time. The Application Server will prove important to many Intranet developers because it provides a more efficient Intranet interface than CGI (common gateway interface) for connecting to corporate databases and it will let developers plug in nearly any database, application, or Web server via a cartridge.
A cartridge is a logic component (or object) programmable in a number of major languages (Java, SQL, C/C++, and Visual Basic). These components plug into a software bus that provides cartridges with access to clients, servers, shared services, and other components. Cartridges have access to Universal Cartridge Services for installation, registration, instantiation, innovation, administration, monitoring, and security. In addition to these universal services, cartridges have access to scalable and specialized services through a software bus called Inter-Cartridge Exchange (ICX).
ICX is an object bus that enables cartridges to communicate with each other across a distributed network. It can use both native IIOP and HTTP interfaces, making whatever translations necessary to cross between different environments like CORBA and DCOM. ICX is implemented as a set of libraries that reside on each networked computer. Through ICX, cartridges have access to other cartridges, clients, servers, and services.
With ICX, ActiveX/COM clients communicate with cartridges via a bridge, Java communicates through CORBA and IIOP, and integration of mainframe systems is done through encapsulation of legacy interfaces. While these interfaces will provide an acceptable foundation for building distributed applications, Network Computing Architecture provides additional services that extend HTTP and IIOP/CORBA.
Scalable cartridge services such as transactions, messaging and queuing, and data access through existing database interfaces are provided. Cartridges also have access to specialized cartridge services that are host-dependent. Data cartridges in a database server have access to extensible database services, application server cartridges have access to distribution and load management services, and client cartridges can connect with standard user-interface protocols.
The standard Web Request Broker comes with three cartridges with interfaces for Java, PL/SQL, and live HTML. Other standard cartridges are available from Oracle, and an open interface is provided to enable other software companies and VARs to integrate their tools and applications. Database services include an extensible query optimizer, an extensible set of access methods, database administration facilities, and a large set of standard data types.
Oracle’s customer-centric view
Compared to Netscape and Microsoft, Oracle’s NCA looks refreshingly customer-centered. In the end, corporate customers don’t care about elegance, they simply want to know what technology to use to solve the problem that confronts them. The biggest challenge facing developers today is simply where to start. Which standards to support? And which vision to bet on? NCA neatly sidesteps the issue by providing an all-inclusive framework that is compatible with other major initiatives. Corporations that have bet the ranch on Microsoft will feel comfortable with NCA. Those who have hitched their wagon to Netscape ONE will feel equally at ease. Agnostics — those who are unwilling to pick a winner — can mix and match those technologies that they find compelling and still fit easily within the Oracle framework.
In the end, versatility is the strength of NCA, it both innovates and accommodates. Where Oracle can add value, it does so; where it cannot, it supplies interfaces for existing products or standards.
Conclusion
Oracle has taken a significant step toward claiming a preeminent role in the Intranet. It has done so by providing some innovative technology and an extensible framework that is open to other visions and technologies. With its NCA, Oracle becomes the Henry Kissinger of the Internet — a strategic thinker who knows when to be a fighter and when to be a diplomat.
Corporate customers like innovation, but they love security. With NCA, Oracle is charting a safe and flexible course for its customers. While Microsoft and Netscape battle, Oracle has positioned itself as a diplomat. In a world in which diplomacy is warfare with manners, Oracle looks like a winner.
