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Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 (9.0.4) New Features

An Oracle White Paper April 2003

Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 (9.0.4) New Features .............................................................. 1

Overview..........................................................................................................................2 1. Enhanced Enterprise Integration Platform.................................................................3

1.1 Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect ..................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Oracle Workflow ........................................................................................................................ 6

2. New Application Development Features ....................................................................8 2.1 J2EE and Internet Application development......................................................................... 8

J2EE ............................................................................................................................................... 8 Web Services ................................................................................................................................. 9 Oracle HTTP Server .................................................................................................................. 10 Oracle9iAS TopLink .................................................................................................................. 10 Business Components for Java (BC4J).................................................................................... 11 Oracle9iAS Forms ...................................................................................................................... 11 Developer Kits and Utilities...................................................................................................... 12

2.2 Portal .......................................................................................................................................... 13 2.3 Wireless ...................................................................................................................................... 13 2.4 Business Intelligence ................................................................................................................ 16

Oracle9iAS Reports Services .................................................................................................... 16 3. New Application Deployment Features.................................................................... 18

3.1 Systems Management and Monitoring .................................................................................. 18 Installation and Configuration.................................................................................................. 19 Management and Administration............................................................................................. 20 Performance Management and Diagnostics ........................................................................... 21 OC4J Administration Enhancements...................................................................................... 22

3.2 Caching and Performance ....................................................................................................... 23 Oracle9iAS Web Cache ............................................................................................................. 23 Other Performance Enhancements ......................................................................................... 24

3.3 Security and Identity Management......................................................................................... 25 Identity Management ................................................................................................................. 25 General Security Enhancements .............................................................................................. 27

3.4 High Availability and Scalability ............................................................................................. 28 Summary........................................................................................................................ 30

Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 (9.0.4) New Features Page 1

OVERVIEW With Oracle9i Application Server (Oracle9iAS) Release 2 Oracle delivered the industry’s first fully integrated Application Server – including a J2EE 1.3 Compatible™ container, an enterprise Portal, Wireless, Business Intelligence, Single Sign-On using a LDAP v3 compliant directory, Enterprise Integration and much more. In September 2002, eWeek Magazine called it a “One Stop App Server Shop”1. Oracle9iAS Release 2 is not only a highly productive, standards-based development environment but also a highly available, scalable, centrally managed and secure deployment platform.

Oracle9iAS is designed to address the challenges caused by middleware complexity and provides the industry’s most complete and integrated e-Business software infrastructure. With updated features and capabilities, Oracle9iAS extends existing investment in infrastructure and functionality that is needed to run a successful e-Business. Oracle9iAS Release 2 (9.0.4), the next release of Oracle9iAS, is slated for summer 2003. This release has key enhancements in each of the following 3 key areas:

• Oracle9iAS Streamlines how Business Applications are Integrated

• Oracle9iAS Simplifies how Internet Applications are Developed

• Oracle9iAS Improves Reliability of Internet Applications

In 9.0.4, enterprise integration has major new enhancements offering business process integration capabilities. Therefore, we start our discussion with this key area of new functionality. Subsequently, we talk about the new features for application development and deployment.

1 See http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=30625,00.asp


1. ENHANCED ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION PLATFORM Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) includes an enhanced Enterprise Integration platform, that provides a comprehensive e-business integration solution delivered as an integral feature of Oracle9iAS. It provides an open, standards-based infrastructure for enterprise application integration (A2A), business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, and web services integration in a single integrated product.

Trading Partner

Integration

Profile Management Exchange Formats

Industry Processes

BusinessActivity

Monitoring

Alerts Reporting Logging Auditing Data Mining

Connection & Messaging Services Message Protocols Delivery Protocols Routing Adapters

Business Process Management Business Events Error Handling Process Management Workflow

Process Optimization Organizational Management Process Automation

Data Management

Transformation Translation Validation Visual Tools Metadata Repository Data Internationalization

Figure 1 - Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect Facilities

1.1 Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect fully leverages the infrastructure of Oracle9iAS to deliver enterprise-strength performance, scalability, and manageability for enterprise-scale integration solutions.

It provides a number of key features including:

• Single Integrated Tool: Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect introduces a single integrated tool for all business aspects of the integration process including design, monitoring, and business intelligence.

• Design: End-to-end modeling of the integration process. Key functions include a data type designer, graphical business process modeler, mapping and transformation designer, validation rule editor, and trading partner administration.

• Business Activity Monitoring: Enables on-line business-level monitoring of the entire integration process including document tracking, collaboration status, and alerts. Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect provides a set of pre-built


reports suited for business users. These reports may be exposed externally to trading partners.

• Process Intelligence: Enables on-line reporting and analysis of the complete history/audit trail maintained by the run-time repository. The product provides pre-built reports that enable the user to evaluate integration activity over time to identify opportunities to improve business processes.

• Metadata: Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect moves to a more comprehensive metadata model adding design-time metadata for business process management and run-time metadata for all levels of event and process activity, as well as history.

• Business Process Management (BPM): Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect is a business process centric solution for e-business integration addressing the full spectrum of business process management requirements in one product. It provides support for automated event processing using user-specified business rules. It enables modeling and management of B2B collaborations such as RosettaNet PIPs. It also includes support for human interactions, such as notifications via email. Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect enables modeling in business terms through process “roles” that maintain a separation between business concepts and application/protocol specific logic. Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect executes business processes using Oracle’s enterprise-proven BPM engine, Oracle Workflow.

• Integration Services: Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect provides an improved collection of services that address the unique requirements of integration including:

o Dictionary Management - Oracle9iAS provides an enhanced dictionary facility to maintain message/document types that may be imported from external sources, such as XML DTDs and Schemas, enterprise applications, or databases.

o Translation – Provides a formal translation facility that converts the external format/syntax of documents to a common internal XML-based syntax. For example, the product can translate an external EDI formatted document to a logically equivalent XML document for internal processing.

o Transformation – A new and improved transformation facility converts the semantics of messages/documents from one form to another. Document maps are defined through a visual mapping tool. Transformation rules may be defined using a library of provided transformation functions including string, math, type conversion, pattern extraction, table lookups, etc. Custom transformation functions may be created using calls to external Java functions.


o Validation – A new validation facility provides the ability to validate documents against user-specified rules. Validation rules are defined as part of document type/business event definitions using a set of provided validation functions that include range checking, table lookups, pattern matching, etc. Custom validation functions may be implemented via external Java functions.

• J2EE Connector Architecture: Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect adds support for the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.0 standard. While Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect complies with the JCA 1.0 specification, extensions are provided to overcome current limitations including support for bi-directional communication, asynchronous notification, and improved metadata interfaces. These extensions are implemented in a manner consistent with the JCA framework and Oracle continues to work within the JCA standards process to have them adopted as part of the standard in the future.

• B2B Protocol Standards: Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect adds support for B2B protocol standards including XML and RosettaNet. Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect includes an extensible, layered B2B protocol engine that manages the following functions:

o Transport: HTTP/S, SMTP, FTP/S, JMS

o Packaging and Signing: SMIME 2.0/3.0, SOAP 1.1

o Document Exchange: XML, RNIF 1.1/2.0

o Collaboration: RosettaNet PIPs, custom

The transport, packaging and signing, and document exchange layers are extensible via an open, java-based plug-in API. Custom collaborations may be created through the product’s visual modeling tool.

• Trading Partner Management - Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect includes a comprehensive trading partner management system that speeds provisioning and streamlines administration of trading partners for B2B collaboration. The trading partner system maintains:

o Profiles – overall contact and communication details for trading partner entities

o Agreements – the specific collaborations, roles, and communication options that dictate how two or more Parties will interact.

• Web Services Integration - Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect adds support for web service integration. Business processes may incorporate web services located on internal networks or over the Internet. Conversely, business processes defined in Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect may be published to customers and other trading partners via web services standards. Web services communication is enabled through support for SOAP 2.2


packaging. The design tool has the ability to import and export WSDL, and can read from and publish to UDDI repositories.

• Enterprise-Strength Deployment Infrastructure - Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect provides a number of new features that improve the products ability to meet the performance, manageability, and scalability requirements of large-scale enterprise environments. Key features include:

o Hub and Spokes Topology – Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect supports a hub and spokes topology. A single hub may support many spokes – applications, B2B protocols, and web services. Spokes (Adapters) may optionally run on hardware outside of the application server.

o Integrity / Consistency – the run-time system provides extensive new features to ensure the consistency and integrity of the integration system. A central “Coordinator” orchestrates all integration activity to ensure consistency of business process and data moving through the system. The “Coordinator” is transactional to ensure the integrity of data and processes.

1.2 Oracle Workflow Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) introduces a number of new Workflow features to provide simplified configuration and management.

Enterprise Manager Integration: In Oracle9iAS (9.0.4), the Workflow Manager is integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). The Workflow Manager delivers a 'dashboard' style of interface accessible through a URL, allowing system administrators to manage Oracle Workflow from a single console.

The Workflow Manager allows system administrators to control Workflow system services, such as background engines, the Notification Mailer, agent listeners, queue propagation, and purging obsolete Workflow data. Administrators can also monitor work item processing by viewing the distribution of all work items by status and drilling down to additional information. Additionally, they can monitor event message processing for local Business Event System agents by viewing the distribution of event messages by status. With this ability to monitor work items and event messages, a system administrator can identify possible bottlenecks easily.

Notification Mailer: The Notification Mailer provides the ability to notify individuals and groups electronically. Notifications can be delivered via e-mail. In 9.0.4 the Notification Mailer has been redesigned with a new wizard based UI, to run as a multi-threaded servlet application for improved configuration, management and performance.

Mailer Parameters: The setup of the Notification Mailer involves configuring certain parameters, such as the outbound e-mail server name, the name of the folder to receive inbound e-mails, the protocol of the inbound e-mail server, the password for the inbound e-mail server, and so on. The configuration parameters are no


longer be stored in a configuration file on the file system, but are now stored in the database and can be configured using Oracle Enterprise Manager. The parameters can also be configured to refresh the Notification Mailer immediately when a parameter value is changed, avOracle Internet Directorying the need to bounce the Notification Mailer manually.

Wireless Notifications: With Oracle9iAS (9.0.4), users can send wireless notifications. Integrating the Oracle Workflow Notification System with Oracle9iAS Wireless enables wireless notifications.

Expression-Based Subscriptions: New in 9.0.4, expression-based subscriptions provide users with a more flexible, powerful way of executing subscriptions dynamically based on the content of the event being raised. An expression-based subscription is executed only if the parameters associated with the subscription match the parameters in the event being raised. For example, if a Service Request Status Change event is raised, users can set up the subscription to be executed only when the status is changed from CLOSE to RE-OPEN and the severity of the service request is 1. By providing this capability, Oracle Workflow now allows users to add such dynamic processing without needing to write any additional logic.

Enhanced Workflow Support for Sophisticated Business Event-Based Processes: Oracle Workflow now provides the ability to define business processes that require more than one event to be received before they are started. This is a common business scenario where you may require messages from different systems within an enterprise before proceeding with a process. For example, messages may be required from both the stock check department and the credit check department before a supplier can ship an item. Another common business requirement is the ability to start a workflow process after receiving any one of a set of events from different systems. Oracle Workflow now supports both these scenarios.


2. NEW APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT FEATURES

Portals

Web Services

Wireless

Enterprise Integration

J2EE Applications

BusinessIntelligence

Figure 2 - Oracle9iAS Application Development Facilities

Oracle9iAS Release 2 provides a productive Application Server environment for developers to develop Internet Applications based on open standards - Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). J2EE Applications can be published as Web Services and can communicate with Web Services built to other platforms. As Internet Applications proliferate within organizations, users can access them more easily through a single point of access - an Enterprise Portal. Internet Applications and Portals can be accessed from any Wireless Device, across any network, and from any geography. Further, up-to-the minute Business Intelligence about your applications and information can be gathered and shared over the Internet through integrated Personalization, Enterprise Reporting and Decision Support.

Oracle9iAS Release 2 (9.0.4) is an incremental release that offers new features in each of the development areas above, focusing on developer productivity, usability and flexibility

2.1 J2EE and Internet Application development

J2EE

Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) includes new features to build on top of the J2EE 1.3 Compatible™ container in the earlier versions.

JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL): Support for JSTL, per JSR-152 is packaged to work out of the box and provides Web developers with the use of JSP to author custom actions, and adds expression language support into the container.

Oracle9iAS Multimedia JSP Tag Library: The multimedia JSP tag library simplifies the creation of JSP web applications that support the upload and retrieval of


multimedia data stored using the Oracle10i media object types. As application developers no longer have to write code to construct multimedia HTML tags or write run-time components to deliver the multimedia data, these tags greatly simplify the process of writing multimedia JSP web applications. The tags also simplify access to data in HTML file upload forms.

Lightweight JMS: JMS support has been enhanced to add a lightweight JMS provider, in addition to the Oracle JMS delivered with earlier releases. The new lightweight JMS is now fully JMS 1.0 compatible, it has been enhanced to support durable messaging through a file based persistence mechanism and provides improved stability and performance. Support for Message Driven Beans has been extended to both Oracle JMS (AQ) and the lightweight OC4J JMS.

Startup and Shutdown Classes: To provide developers with the ability to control what happens at container startup and shutdown a new facility has been added to enable one or more classes to be invoked automatically when the container starts and stops.

Logging: 9.0.4 introduces a new alternative XML-based logging mode using the Oracle Diagnostic Logging facility. This new logging mode supports log file rotation, and allows you to define maximum file and directory size for your log file directories. The Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle9iAS Console can read, aggregate and display these log files.

Web Services

Web Services are a key part of the Oracle9iAS middleware strategy. Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) provides a comprehensive platform for delivering Web service enabled applications as a result of continued innovation in the product. Many of the Oracle9iAS components themselves, including the new Enterprise Integration platform, Portal, and Wireless have leveraged these platform capabilities to provide Web Services support. These enhancements have extended the ability to easily integrate disparate systems through the standard web services protocol, providing developers with a simplified way to consume Web service enabled applications across the entire Oracle9iAS stack.

The Web services platform capabilities have evolved over the last 2 releases – with a host of new features in 9.0.3 and 9.0.4. Oracle9iAS (9.0.3) introduced the following new Web services platform level features:

• Stateless Java classes as Document Style Web services

• Stateful Java classes as Style Web services

• JMS endpoints (Topics and Queues) as Document Style Web Services

• Complete UDDI v1.0 Compliant registry.

• Automated generation of Home page for Web services;


• HTTP GET access to Web Services so that you can use browser as web services client to test the web services without having to write a web services client application.

• Support for registering Custom Serializer and Deserializer.

• JSP tag library for invoking Web Services directly from OC4J. In addition, 9.0.4 introduces a number of new platform level features that enhance developer flexibility and productivity in building, and testing Web services:

• SOAP headers and header API for accessing and creating SOAP headers.

• SOAP fault support for ill formed SOAP requests.

• WSDL analyzer tool to test simple Web Services without needing to write client applications.

• Support PL/SQL CLOB, BLOB and XML type support.

• Support for the UDDI v2 specification: Publisher assertion via the business relationship tModel; Inquiry/publishing enhancements including support for wildcards; Business name/identifier collections; User authentication/authorization; Entity validation with external services (e.g. integrate with Dun and Bradstreet validation services); Support for UDDI v2.0 replication API; and support for an installable UDDI schema into a non-Oracle database such as IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server.

Oracle HTTP Server

To incorporate the latest optimizations and security features of Apache, the Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) uses Apache (v1.3.27).

Log File Rotation: 9.0.4 introduces log file rotation such that large log files can be rotated over time for archiving purposes. The new rotation feature allows you to specify the path, logging level, maximum file size and rotation hour.

Security Enhancements: There are a number of OHS security enhancements in 9.0.4 including session renegotiation, nCipher SSL support, port tunneling and OHS to OC4J SSL support. These features are described in more detail in the Security section.

Oracle9iAS TopLink

In 9.0.4, Oracle9iAS TopLink, acquired by Oracle shortly after the initial release of Oracle9iAS Release 2, has been fully integrated into the Oracle9iAS stack, including the installation, globalization support and the security model, in addition to number of key developer productivity and usability enhancements.

Productivity Enhancements in Mapping Workbench: The Mapping Workbench (MW) has been enhanced with a number of new features that simplify certain tasks for developers as well as making first-pass development more effective.


• The number of files generated by the Mapping Workbench (MW) has been reduced to the bare minimum, which simplifies integration with Source Code Management (SCM) systems.

• Interaction with read-only files has been improved to prompt the user when such a file needs to be updated, thereby reducing manual development effort.

• The MW provides a rich GUI to fully create and configure session configuration files. These files allow developers to configure the runtime server with one or more sessions, each with their own JDBC, JTA, mapping data, etc. Previously customers were required to create/edit these files by hand based upon a DTD. The source generation is enhanced for MW developers who generate their business model from tables. This will produce more effective first pass code making initial development, proof-of-concept, and demos more effective.

Additional Architectures and Message Formats: In Oracle9iAS Release 2, TopLink offered a command-messaging layer between sessions using serialized custom objects. In 9.0.4, the messaging infrastructure has been extended to support additional architectures and messaging formats. TopLink’s session command messaging is enhanced with internal and external proxy modules. This provides the infrastructure necessary to also support messaging to non-TopLink peers. In conjunction with the cluster proxy module, a specific implementation has been provided that can convert session commands into XML for non-TopLink and non-Java messaging peers.

Business Components for Java (BC4J)

Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) improves the ease of deployment, scalability, and runtime aspects of Business Components for Java (BC4J). Specifically, 9.0.4 provides support for creating business components that are mapped to EJB 2.0 local entity beans. This enables entity bean programmers to take advantage of BC4J's validation and client binding capabilities. It has declarative support for stateless service beans. It supports running and debugging BC4J EJB Session Beans in the embedded OC4J container. It also has support for Jakarta Struts for BC4J JSP applications. BC4J automatically updates new audit history attribute types with the current date or the authenticated username.

Oracle9iAS Forms

Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) provides developers with new features to control access from the URL, to enhance start-up performance and improve management and monitoring through Enterprise Manager.

Access Control through URL Parameters: This new feature allows developers or administrators to define which parameters allowed in the URL. This is particularly useful to ensure end users cannot randomly access a form using parameters that may be valid but not allowed (for security reasons). For example, this allows the


developer to restrict the usage of the USERID parameter in the URL thereby forcing the end-user to always log in using the default login window.

Improved Start-Up Performance: The new runtime pre-start feature provides performance improvements of Forms startup time by pre-starting runtimes for different applications.

Enhanced Management and Monitoring: 9.0.4 introduces new Forms management features including the ability to manage environment configuration and trace configuration files, and support for the new Runtime Pre-Start feature. Monitoring enhancements include start/stop tracing, view live trace output, and the ability to search on processes based on criteria in the EM console.

Enhanced SSO & ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY support: This feature improves upon the previous Single Sign-On and ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY integration, especially regarding error handling and password expiration.

Developer Kits and Utilities

Content Management SDK: Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) includes the Content Management Software Development Kit (CM SDK), a robust document lifecycle system, built in Java, and integrated with other Oracle content management API products. New features introduced in 9.0.4 include:

• A starter sample web application to help developer’s get up and running quickly - this includes details on how to write, package and deploy a sample CM SDK web application that allows users to create, view, edit, delete, rename and move files and directories.

• FileSynch feature enhancements including improved logging features, enhanced troubleshooting framework and ability to exclude individual files or subdirectories from FileSynch.

• Administration and reporting enhancements including improved administrative interfaces, support for managing BFILEs, support for historical reporting and better integration with Enterprise Manager.

Note: The Oracle Content Management SDK was formerly known as the Oracle Internet File System. For a complementary packaged solution built on the CM SDK, see Oracle Files (which ships with the Oracle Collaboration Suite).

MapViewer: MapViewer provides powerful data visualization and reporting services that render business data (demographics etc.) as easily understood thematic maps or as location data using unique map symbols to differentiate between points (service site locations etc.). In this release, MapViewer has extended its Java functionality. It now includes a new Java client API as well as a new JSP tag library to aid application developers. Additional new features include the ability for maps to query associated non-spatial data (using Java client-side methods to select and identify map features such as a city, a street, a property etc.), customizable map legends that describe the features on the map, and basic support for geographically referenced images (aerial photos, satellite images etc.).


2.2 Portal Oracle9iAS Portal introduces a number of new features in 9.0.4 to enhance usability, developer productivity and flexibility through new wizards, and portlets to simplify data access.

Developer Productivity and Flexibility: 9.0.4 introduces new capabilities for integrating data into Oracle9iAS Portal, the OmniPortlet and Web Clipping. OmniPortlet incorporates a feature set for building portlets that render data in a variety of formats like charts, forms, tables, and bullet lists from different data sources including Web Services, XML data, and spreadsheets (CSV). Using OmniPortlet, non-technical page developers simply follow a series of steps in a wizard to leverage data without having to understand all the technical details of Web Services and XML. Web Clipping provides a quick and easy way for page designers to capture existing public and secure web page content and present it as portlets. Web Clippings may also be personalized through parameters.

In addition, significant usability improvements have been made in the Portal design-time environment. New and revised portlets and builder pages speed access to objects throughout the portal and make Portal administration more efficient. Updates to wizards and portlet defaults in the WebDAV, search, content publishing and content approval components make it easier for page designers to create pages and manage portal content.

Syndication Services: In 9.0.4 Portal content administrators can set up subscriptions to DAV, file system, and Portal-based content for use by page developers. Using a step-by-step wizard-based approach, a subscription or "channel" can be created to "push" content on a regular interval to the Portal repository, or designated to "pull" the latest content upon request by the page viewer. Content administrators can also easily publish existing Portal folder content as subscriptions for use by other Portal instances. In addition, applications developed against the Oracle Content Management SDK (CM SDK) can deliver their content directly to Portal.

Optimized Page Assembly: In 9.0.2, Portal page assembly was primarily a function of the Portal Parallel Page Engine (PPE). New in 9.0.4, Web Cache can be used as Portal's primary cache and page assembly engine. When Web Cache is enabled, content is encoded with ESI tags for processing within Web Cache. This new feature enables remote enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) deployments for Portal and yields significant performance improvements over prior versions.

Portal Upgrade: The Portal Metadata Repository (PMR), Login Server and integrated portal directory functionality of Oracle9iAS Release 1 can be upgraded to PMR Release 2, Oracle9iAS Single Sign On and Oracle Internet Directory.

2.3 Wireless In 9.0.4, Oracle9iAS Wireless introduces a host of new features to enhance access to a wide variety of devices, protocols and networks through XHTML, deliver J2ME support, provide intelligent messaging and enable support for these new capabilities through the new Wireless Toolkit.


Device, Protocol and Network Support through XHTML: Wireless supports applications written in XHTML, an accepted W3C standard for building multi-channel applications. Applications created in XHTML have the flexibility to adapt to a wide variety of devices, protocols and networks – maximizing development efforts by easing the complexity of wireless development.

XHTML applications let developers write an application once, using an open standard, and deliver it to any device. XHTML applications can be delivered through voice technology, through messaging such as SMS, and through any micro-browser. Developers can also take advantage of the enhanced device adaptation and management capabilities offered by Oracle9iAS Wireless. This allows application optimization for any device – whether it is PDAs, small-screen devices or voice browsers.

Also new to the multi-channel server is Multimedia Adaptation Services. Oracle9iAS Wireless Multimedia Adaptation Services provide device-specific adaptation of images, ringtones, voice grammars and audio/video streams. Devices support different image formats and have different screen sizes and color depths. As part of the content adaptation performed by Oracle9iAS Wireless in responding to a request, images are dynamically adapted to suit the device. Ringtone adaptation allows for conversion of ringtone data to formats supported by the most popular phones such as RTTTL, iMelody and MIDI. The flexible framework for ringtone adaptation allows developers to easily add support for new ringtone formats.

J2ME Development and Provisioning: In 9.0.4, Oracle9iAS Wireless includes the J2ME Provisioning system, support for J2ME access to Web Services, and new functionality that allows for advanced J2ME development:

• Provisioning: J2ME applications are provisioned, managed, and delivered to J2ME devices, leveraging the existing Oracle9iAS Wireless service infrastructure.

• Instrumentation: Customers can filter applications being sent over their network and control the behavior of applications downloaded on devices. It automatically scans all applications for 'non-secure' code and allows restrictions to be set for individual applications at the API level.

• Digital Rights Management: Customers can add a digital layer around J2ME applications at the time of download. This digital wrapper supports billing strategies including try-and-buy, subscription and usage-based models. This feature gives customers additional business options without affecting the performance of the applications.

• OTA Delivery: New to Oracle9iAS Wireless in 9.0.4 is the J2ME Provisioning system and its unique ability to support Over-The-Air (OTA) delivery to J2ME devices. An open, extensible transport and network infrastructure seamlessly interconnects (enclosed) J2ME delivery infrastructure with Oracle9iAS Wireless J2ME Provisioning system services.


• Development: In 9.0.4, Oracle9iAS Wireless allows for the creation of custom catalogs of J2ME applications that can be based on functionality, target devices and target subscribers. In addition, activity logging, performance monitoring and reporting tools speeds deployment of applications while application administration and authorization functionality eases management.

• J2ME support provides developers with the ability to extend web services to J2ME applications. Oracle9iAS allows MIDlet (Mobile Information Device Applets) developers to access standard web services. MIDlet developers can make calls to services on Oracle9iAS Wireless, and can get responses from those services, by making remote procedure calls through the J2ME proxy. By making Oracle9iAS Wireless web services easily accessible to MIDlets, integration of web service functionality into MIDlets is greatly simplified and optimized for performance. Additionally, MIDlet developers can utilize built-in features optimizing communication such as request and response caching if the network is unavailable. The calls can automatically resume when the network connectivity is restored.

• Intelligent Messaging and Multi-media Messaging: 9.0.4 further enhances intelligent messaging with new functionality for actionable alerts, message adaptation, and failover delivery control. Also new are multi-media messaging (MMS) features that enable richer messaging experiences with device adaptation done automatically. Additionally, existing messaging capabilities have been improved to include more flexible message templates, security to prevent message spoofing, support for message prioritization, and more flexibility in handling volume alerts.

• MMS: Oracle9iAS Wireless supports MMS for rich-media mobile messages including graphics, video and audio. MMS messages can be authored natively in SMIL or XHTML. Messages that are authored generically in XHTML will automatically be adapted for devices by Oracle9iAS Wireless. The power of adaptation allows a message to be written once and optimized for each the receiving device’s capabilities. Multi-media content is optimized for the device by using Multimedia Adaptation Services. For example, multi-media content can be optimized for the device by using image conversion allowing images to be altered from rich color to black and white or by excluding the image for devices that may not support them.

• Actionable Alerts: Messages can be sent, and responded to, using the new actionable alerting capabilities enabling further action from a sent alert. The location based enabled alert service generates and delivers alert messages based on a mobile users’ current location. For example, a traveler may subscribe to messaging service that sends an alert when their limo is within 0.1 mile of the airport. Or a field service coordinator receives an alert when a service engineer is within two miles of a customer with an urgent service request.


Further customizations of target devices for alert subscriptions and alerts that are time driven have also been added to the alert engine functionality.

Development Support with Wireless Toolkit: The Wireless Toolkit will integrate with any IDE, including JDeveloper, and allow fast development and testing of wireless applications. The toolkit will allow fast and easy development with multi-channel XHTML, J2ME, voice, mobile browser, and SMS all in a small footprint toolkit. With JDeveloper, mobile developers can utilize code templates, point-and-click-development and automatic deployment to the application server.

Web Clipping: New in 9.0.4, Web clipping for wireless allows wireless service developers to quickly extract Web-based content for direct presentation in wireless devices. Web Clippings can also be used programmatically by client applications over Java APIs or the JCA Common Client Interface. To create a wireless Web clipping application, the user uses a Web browser to navigate to the Web page containing the desired content, then selects the portion of the page to clip and scrape, sets some attributes and if the Web clipping uses form-based submission, exposes input parameters, saves the application, and tests the application. Web clipping support includes:

• Navigation through various styles of login mechanisms, including form and JavaScript-based submission and HTTP Basic and Digest Authentication with cookie-based session management

• Fuzzy matching of clippings. If a Web clipping gets reordered within the source page or if its character font, size, or style changes, it will still be identified correctly by the Wireless Web Clipping Server and delivered as the wireless Web clipping application content.

• Reuse a wide range of Web content, including basic support of pages written with HTML 4.0.1, JavaScript, applets, and plug-in enabled content, retrieved through HTTP GET and POST (form submission).

Location Based Services (LBS): 9.0.4 introduces many additional LBS features through the wireless application tool and the wireless portal tool that augment the existing APIs. These tools allow mobile positioning to provide the user's current location, and privacy management, to control when and to whom a mobile user's location is available. Both mobile positioning and the caching of the location information can be enabled or disabled by the system or by individual users. Users can grant mobile positioning access to other users or groups of users (communities) for a certain date range and for specified time windows.

2.4 Business Intelligence

Oracle9iAS Reports Services

Oracle9i Reports can now be used from within Oracle Workflow. Executing a report can be added to the workflow as an activity. Oracle9iAS Reports Services will notify the workflow when the job is finished. You can add taxonomy information (e.g. Author, etc.) to any PDF document generated by Oracle9iAS


Reports Services. The server environment can be switched on a per-job basis to change attributes. This is very useful in customizing output based on, for example, NLS settings.

Oracle9iAS Reports now support publishing your report output to any WebDAV or FTP server. Oracle9iAS Reports Services can be accessed from any J2EE container or from the command-line using the Reports J2EE Thin Client. Oracle9i Reports SDK provides developers ultimate flexibility by enabling them to create their own data sources, destinations, notifiers, engines, etc. Oracle9iAS Discoverer Oracle9iAS delivers a number of new Discoverer features in 9.0.4 including a Java command-line tool for End User Layer (EUL) maintenance, improved facilities to create graphs with richer formatting options, enhanced Enterprise Manager integration, and performance optimizations.

Java Command-Line Tool for EUL Maintenance: 9.0.4 introduces a new Java Command Line Tool to install, manage and maintain the EUL, business area and workbooks without the need to install Oracle9i Discoverer Administrator or Oracle9iDS. All Discoverer customers, especially those using Oracle9i Warehouse Builder, benefit from this feature as they can manage their EULs by simply running commands from commonly used platforms including Solaris 2.8 and 2.9, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Linux, Windows NT / 2000 / XP.

Enhanced Graphing Capabilities: Discoverer continues to provide tight integration with the latest release of the BI Beans’ Graph bean. This feature includes a series of improvements to the graph layout, display and color options, scaling, manipulation and interactivity of the graph. Users benefit from the flexibility and ease of use of the new graph features that minimize the manual alterations by providing more automatic settings to maximize the presentation quality of the graph.

Enhanced Administration: 9.0.4 introduces a richer set of configuration and runtime administration tools, enhanced performance metrics, including CPU and memory usage, logging and diagnostic information through integration with Enterprise Manager.

Optimized Performance for Complex Folders: Oracle9iAS Discoverer offers an excellent way to present users with very easy-to-understand concepts. Oracle9i Discoverer Administrator provides simple, complex and custom folder options in a business area. Complex folders contain items from one or more other folders, which enable you to create a combined view of data from multiple folders. This is analogous to a view in the database. Oracle9iAS Discoverer generates highly optimized SQL that runs faster when using complex folders. Many joins and items can be defined within folders at design time, but these joins and items will only be applied at runtime if relevant to the result set. Oracle9iAS Discoverer intelligently uses joins that are needed and only refers to database columns required to satisfy a given query. By eliminating joins from complex folders at runtime, the overhead of using them is minimized which results in much faster query execution and less network usage.


3. NEW APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT FEATURES

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racle9iAS not only provides the industry’s most productive development vironment for Internet Applications but also provides a mission critical platform r highly scaleable, highly available Internet Applications. With Oracle9iAS, you n deploy and manage your Applications reliably. With Oracle9iAS, you can

eploy any of these applications with excellent Performance and Scalability, ducing the amount of hardware you need to provide the same quality of service users. You can further improve the performance, scalability, and availability of ur systems through built in Web Caching. Your applications will remain Highly

vailable across system failures, and when software maintenance operations are rried out. Finally, you can implement a centralized Systems Management,

ecurity and Directory framework to monitor, manage and secure all of your istributed systems and users. These capabilities are illustrated in the figure below.

racle9iAS (9.0.4) introduces a wide range of enhancements to the deployment cilities including significant management and monitoring enhancements through terprise manager, caching and other performance enhancements across the entire

ack, new security enhancements including an identity management solution and y high availability and clustering enhancements.

.1 Systems Management and Monitoring racle9iAS (9.0.4) introduces major enhancements to the systems management,

erformance management and diagnostics features of Oracle9iAS, as well as ecific enhancements to OC4J administration.


Installation and Configuration

Oracle9iAS Release 2 (9.0.4) introduces many new features and enhancements to the installation and configuration process. These enhancements include:

Robust pre-requisite checks: With the inclusion of 60% more automated pre-requisite checks, the 9.0.4 installation process ensures the system environment meets all Oracle9iAS system requirements. Key enhancements include checks for OS version, OS patches, and for Linux, checks for OS vendor, kernel version and glibc version.

Customized ports: Oracle9iAS v904 makes it possible for the user to specify the ports used by Oracle9iAS components. For ports that the user doesn’t specify, the installer allocates a non-conflicting port within a specific port range. The complete list of ports used by a particular Oracle9iAS instance can be found in $ORACLE_HOME/install. Moreover, it is possible to change the ports after the installation is complete, through Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle9iAS Console.

Using existing Oracle Database as Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository: Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository is required for 3 types of services for middle tier components: Product Metadata, Identity Management and optionally, for database managed Oracle9iAS Clustering. In addition to the seeded database option, which was provided in 9.0.2, this new release provides a new tool, the Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository Creation Assistant allows you to load the Metadata Repository into an existing Oracle Database (version 9.0.1.4 or above). For customers who already have an Oracle9i Database, this feature provides them an option to reduce the overhead of additional database administration and maintenance. The existing database, which can be a 32-bit, 64-bit, standalone or RAC-enabled server, is validated before the Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository is loaded into it.

Install-Phase Customization of Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository Database: With 9.0.4, users have increased flexibility in configuring the database during the installation of the Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository. Users can now customize the SID/Global Database Name, system password, character sets, and the location of data files for the Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository during the installation process.

Access to Oracle Internet Directory in secure mode: While installing “Portal and Wireless” or “Business Intelligence and Forms”, the Oracle9iAS installation process needs to access Oracle Internet Directory. In many cases the directory server is located behind a firewall and may require secure access. Now it is possible to use either the secure or non-secure ports during middle tier installations.

Installation of Forms and Reports without Infrastructure: Oracle9iAS (9.0.2) provided a workaround to remove Infrastructure as a post install step, when Forms Services and Reports Services did not require the use of Single Sign-On. Starting with Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) Oracle9iAS Forms Services and Reports Services can be installed with or without the Infrastructure. If you want to install Forms and Reports to use Single Sign-On feature, just select Oracle9i Application Server – Business Intelligence and Forms installation type. If you want to install Forms and Reports without Single Sign-On feature, install Oracle9iAS Forms and Reports


services from a separate CD. (This separate CD is scheduled to be available shortly after Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) is released).

Granular installation options with Oracle9iAS Infrastructure: This release provides three installation options with Oracle9iAS Infrastructure: “Identity Management and Metadata Repository”, “Identity Management” and “Metadata Repository”. Typically for development environment, most users would choose the default Identity Management and Metadata Repository installation option. If you want to install and configure Identity Management behind a firewall, and would like to have Oracle9iAS Middle Tier and its Product Metadata that is stored in the Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository on a separate host, you can do so with a combination of Identity Management only installation option and Metadata Repository only installation option. These installation options are provided to cover the wide spectrum of developer to high-end deployment environment requirements.

Multiple middle tiers on the same host can belong to different Farms: For each middle tier installation, the user is given a choice to associate with an Oracle9iAS Infrastructure instance, and hence belong to a farm. Previously, all middle tier instances on the same host always belonged to the same farm. This new enhancement provides the ability to keep development, staging and deployment environments completely isolated from each other and yet on the same machine.

High Availability of Oracle9iAS Infrastructure Installation and Configuration: Oracle9iAS Infrastructure can be installed in the following hardware cluster environments: RAC and Cold Failover Cluster. In a RAC installation, the installation process guarantees identical configuration of all the nodes selected by the user.

Enhanced Configuration Tools: Many feature enhancements were added to Oracle9iAS configuration tools to enable great flexibility and control during the configuration phase of Oracle9iAS middle tier and Infrastructure installations. Configuration assistant tools now write log files into a central location, provide better and more descriptive error messages in the log files, as well as start/restart the configuration tools.

In addition to these enhancements, many restrictions of Oracle9iAS (9.0.2) have been removed from 9.0.4 including the /var/tmp requirement, FQDN (fully qualified domain name) requirement and the restriction that all installations on the same host be done by the same user.

Management and Administration

Central web-based management console for the entire Oracle environment: The new Enterprise Manager web-based central console provides a complete view of the Oracle managed environment, including the application servers you need to monitor and manage. The central console’s Oracle9iAS Home Page shows you the critical information you need to know about your application server: status, responsiveness, resource usage, components, J2EE applications and critical alerts. You can also easily view the status and performance of each component of the Oracle9iAS instance. The management and monitoring of each component is


completely integrated into the central console, making it simple for you to administer any component of Oracle9iAS.

Centralized Port Administration: The new Ports Table consolidates information on the various ports that have been configured across all of the components in an Oracle9iAS installation and provides links to the Enterprise Manager pages where the ports configurations can be modified. The Ports Table page also provides tips and detailed help on the relationship and dependencies of ports used by the various components.

Archival and Copy Configuration: The new archival and copy utility in 9.0.4 allows you to take a configuration snapshot and either archive (and version) it, or re-apply the configuration on a different Oracle9iAS instance. This feature provides increased flexibility allowing administrators to revert back to previous configurations and to facilitate easy mirroring of application server instances.

Install Flexibility: 9.0.4 provides greater installation flexibility, allowing the Oracle9iAS Metadata Repository to be installed into an existing Oracle9i database.

Performance Management and Diagnostics

Pre-configured “out-of-box” performance metrics: Enterprise Manager dramatically improves the out-of-box manageability of Oracle9iAS (9.0.4). Critical performance monitoring is built into the application server and Enterprise Manager continuously monitors Oracle9iAS and its components. Thresholds are set out-of-box on key performance metrics so you will instantly see when problems occur. Notifications can also be sent via email or to SMS paging devices. The thresholds for each metric can also be customized. You can specify a particular value for a threshold or use a baseline. A baseline is a performance snapshot of your Oracle9iAS instance during a period of time when the instance was running to your specifications. You can then specify that thresholds be defined as a percentage deviation from the baseline values.

Application Performance Management (APM): In addition to monitoring the Oracle9iAS instance and its components, Oracle9iAS also allows you to monitor your deployed web applications based upon end-user response time. The APM capabilities can monitor the availability and performance of your web applications based on actual end-user response time for any of the pages of your application. End-to-end tracing allows application diagnostics and tuning at both the application server and database server layers. Finally, you can also “record” critical business transactions for your application, which Enterprise Manager can “play” periodically to track performance of key components of your application. You can also specify that these transactions be initiated from anywhere on your network, so you can track performance of your application for globally dispersed users. This end-user monitoring feature is powered in part by special instrumentation in Web Cache. This enables customers to measure and analyze application performance, cache locally, to improve application server performance and cache remotely (eCDN) to reduce delays caused by network latencies


Performance diagnostic drilldowns and reports: Enterprise Manager helps you to identify performance bottlenecks across all tiers of your application. New diagnostic features allow you to track time spent in the web server or J2EE container, identify high impact applications, servlets, JSPs and EJBs.

Historical performance data repository and analysis: In Oracle9iAS (9.0.4), Enterprise Manager stores the performance and availability data for your instance over time. Using this historical data you can analyze performance over time, diagnose past problems as they occurred, look for trends, and report on historical performance and availability. You can also look back over time and compare the performance of 2 or more instances.

Enhanced Diagnostics via Central Log Viewer: A new Log Viewer simplifies the process of locating and viewing Oracle9iAS log information. This includes the diagnostic logs produced by OC4J, Web Cache, HTTP Server, and Oracle9iAS Portal. A single HTML interface provides a list of the discovered logs, any of which can be viewed and searched directly. The Log Viewer builds a repository of log entries for major Oracle9iAS components, which can be queried from the Log Viewer for quick access to operational and diagnostic information. The Log Viewer will be provided as an integral component of the Enterprise Manager console for Oracle9iAS.

Enhanced Web Cache Diagnostics: In 9.0.2, the Web Cache monitoring pages provide a consolidated roll-up of metrics for all source- Web servers used by the Web Cache. In 9.0.4, this diagnostic information will be enhanced to provide a breakdown of Web Cache performance metrics for each contributing Web server. Web Cache monitoring is also enhanced to provide information on popular web documents that are not currently being cached. This provides the administrator with valuable information that can be used to tune the Web Cache rules to allow these popular documents to cache for faster access.

OC4J Administration Enhancements

Java Message Service Administration: J2EE applications can be configured to use a Java Message Service (JMS) for passing data asynchronously between application components. The OC4J administration interface makes it easier to take advantage of JMS by providing information on all of the “JMS providers” available for the application in the OC4J container. From this page administrators can also add, edit or remove JMS providers.

Configuring and Monitoring Message Driven Beans: In 9.0.4, the OC4J administration interface allows easier configuring and monitoring of Message Driven Beans (MDB), including a new MDB properties page and display of referenced MDB resources during application deployment.

Easier Configuration of J2EE Data Sources: The OC4J administration interface includes a new “create-like” feature that provides the ability to create new data sources based upon an existing configured data source.


3.2 Caching and Performance With recent ECPerf and SPECJAppserver20012 performance results Oracle9iAS is a proven leader in performance. Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) continues to focus on performance as a critical differentiator by continuing to evolve and improve performance across the entire product.

Oracle9iAS Web Cache

Oracle9iAS Release 2 (9.0.4) offers Web caching enhancements in the areas of performance monitoring, security, invalidation, compression, logging, diagnostics, and manageability. End-user Performance Monitoring: Perhaps the most significant new Web Cache feature in Oracle9iAS Release 2 (9.0.4) is instrumentation for End-user Performance Monitoring. Administrators can configure Web Cache to measure end-user response times for individual URLs, sets of URLs, or even the entire Web application, regardless of whether the URLs are cached. For each instrumented request, the complete user experience is recorded, from the time a user clicks on a link until the time the page fully renders in the user’s browser. The raw measurements are collected in the Web Cache access logs. This data is then aggregated, cleansed and analyzed by Enterprise Manager 4.0 using its Application Performance Management (APM) functionality. The result is the most comprehensive and accurate end-user performance monitoring system in the industry, providing click-to-render measurement and reporting in a manner completely transparent to the end-user.

Support for search keys: In previous releases of Web Cache, the URL-based cache key was the only identifier for a cached document. Invalidation requests needed to specify either exact URLs or a set of URLs and headers matching a regular expression in order to invalidate cached objects. Because it can be difficult for applications to map URLs to the underlying data used to generate those URLs, Web Cache invalidation has been extended in 9.0.4 to support search keys. Cached objects can now be associated with multiple application-specified search keys, with the URL-based key being the primary key. Invalidation can be based on the search keys instead of the primary URL-based key, making invalidation easier for administrators and application developers to use.

Self-describing compression policies: The ESI Surrogate-Control response header now supports a “compress” control directive for enabling compression. This feature adds flexibility by enabling developers to express compression policies in the content itself, as opposed to relying on administrators to configure compression policies using the Web Cache Manager utility.

Improved access logging, event logging, and diagnostics: Rollover policies for access and event logs are more flexible than in previous releases, and on-demand rollover has also been added. Access log formats are now easier and more flexible to define, making them fully compatible for use with third-party log analysis tools.

2 Refer to http://www2.theserverside.com/ecperf/index.jsp for the full ECPerf results and http://www.spec.org/osg/jAppServer2001/results/jAppServer2001.html for full details on the SPECJAppserver2001 results.


http://www2.theserverside.com/ecperf/index.jsp

http://www.spec.org/osg/jAppServer2001/results/jAppServer2001.html

Administrators can also configure different access logs and logging formats for different virtual hosts serviced by the cache. And new access log fields have been introduced that provide low-level request-timing diagnostics. With 9.0.4, Web Cache event logs support four levels of verbosity instead of two, and many of the error messages have been improved (especially for ESI errors), both of which accelerate problem diagnosis and resolution. Finally, remote diagnostic tools have been enhanced to provide more information about response failures.

Integration with Oracle Process Management and Notification (OPMN): In addition to managing OHS and OC4J processes, OPMN now manages the cache and admin server processes for Web Cache, including the start, stop and auto-restart operations. For standalone Web Cache deployments, administrators continue to use the Web Cache Control (webcachectl) and “watchdog” process management utilities.

Dynamic configuration: A number of the configuration parameters in the browser-based Web Cache Manager administration utility can now be changed on the fly, without requiring a restart of the cache.

Security Features: Web Cache now supports applications that require client-side SSL certificates for PKI-based authentication and supports nCipher for SSL hardware acceleration. Refer to the Security section below for more information on these two features.

Other Performance Enhancements

Enterprise Manager: 9.0.4 includes key enhancements to dramatically improve the performance of the Oracle9iAS Console. User interface pages have been optimized to improve download speed and data retrieval from the management repository. In addition, progress dialogs have been added for longer running operations, such as application deployment, to track task progress.

Enterprise Integration: The enhanced Enterprise Integration run-time system provides a number of new features to deliver exceptional performance and scalability. The mid-tier is stateless and can be replicated across multiple Oracle9iAS instances. Hubs and spokes may be deployed on different machines. Adapters may be run in parallel to enable multiple connections to a given end-point. The product leverages Oracle database features such as parallel processing and RAC to achieve performance and scalability for the run-time repository.

BC4J: BC4J tunes queries proactively with interactive “Explain Plan” for View Objects and View Links. It can save SQL generation scripts while forward engineering database tables. Using the pooling and scalability configuration tool allows developers to edit pooling and scalability configuration settings easily. In 9.0.4, BC4J automatically passivates and activates dynamic View Objects and Attributes. For improved performance, BC4J creates and initializes default values for row in a single call. It further eliminates network round trips with batch metadata fetching.

Oracle9iAS Forms Services: In Oracle9iAS (9.0.4), Forms includes the ability to switch tracing on or off for a specific runtime process, which can be useful in


improving performance. It also has extended support for configuring Forms services for improved performance - formsweb.cfg, default.env, and trace.cfg. The run-time pre-start feature improves Forms startup time by pre-starting instances of the Forms runtime.

Oracle9iAS Discoverer: In 9.0.4, Oracle9iAS Discoverer generates highly optimized SQL that runs faster when using complex folders. Many joins and items can be defined within folders at design time, but these joins and items will only be applied at runtime if relevant to the result set. Oracle9iAS Discoverer intelligently uses joins that are needed and only refers to database columns required to satisfy a given query. By eliminating joins from complex folders at runtime, the overhead of using them is minimized which results in much faster query execution and less network usage.

3.3 Security and Identity Management Oracle9iAS introduces Oracle Identity Management as a new security solution in 9.0.4, in addition to a host of security enhancements across the entire product.

Identity Management

Oracle Identity Management is an aggregation of directory, security and user management functionality. Oracle Identity Management is an integrated infrastructure that Oracle products rely on for distributed security. Oracle9iAS is the primary release vehicle for Oracle Identity Management, however it will also ship as part of the infrastructure with other Oracle products including the Oracle9i Database and Oracle9i Collaboration Suite. Oracle Identity Management includes the following components and capabilities:

Oracle Internet Directory (ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY): A scalable, robust LDAP V3-compliant directory service implemented on the Oracle9i Database.

Oracle Directory Integration Service: Part of ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY, which permits synchronization between ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY and other directories and user repositories.

Provisioning Integration Service: Part of ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY, which provides automatic provisioning services for Oracle components and applications and, through standard interfaces, third-party applications.

Delegated Administration Service: Part of ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY, which provides trusted proxy-based administration of directory information by users and application administrators.

Oracle9iAS Single Sign-on: An Oracle9iAS component, which provides single sign-on access to Oracle and third-party web applications.

Oracle9iAS Certificate Authority: Generates and publishes X.509 V3 PKI certificates to support strong authentication methods.

New features and capabilities for Oracle Identity Management components are described below.


Oracle Internet Directory

ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY introduces a number of new features and capabilities with Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) including windows integration, new password policy options, and partial replication features.

Windows Integration Capabilities: ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY now provides a pre-configured directory synchronization solution for Windows Active Directory Services. This allows users to have a single identity and password credential across the Oracle and Windows environments. It also includes directory plug-ins that support mastering and changing passwords stored in the Windows environment, relieving customers of overhead and potential security concerns associated with synchronizing passwords across the two environments.

Flexible Password Policy: ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY supports new password policy options. In addition, a new ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY plug-in support allows customers to implement an almost unlimited variety of site-specific password policies.

Partial Replication: New replication models are now supported with ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY, enabling improved scalability and performance in large network configurations.

Other Features: Other new features include support for dynamic groups, an expanded ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY Self-Service Console, easy synchronization of directory data with database tables, and features to permit user identity synchronization with the Oracle e-Business Suite Release 11i.

Oracle9iAS Single Sign-On

Oracle9iAS Single Sign-On (SSO) now includes support for multilevel authentication.

Multilevel Authentication: SSO allows customers to establish more than one authentication mechanism, and to indicate the way in which a user authenticated to single sign-on enabled applications. Applications can take advantage of this to grant different degrees of privilege to users depending on how they authenticated. For example, a user may get partial privileges if they authenticated via password, but more complete privileges if they used stronger authentication such as X.509v3.

Oracle9iAS Certificate Authority

Oracle9iAS Certificate Authority (OCA) is a new component in 9.0.4. It completes Oracle’s public key infrastructure (PKI) offering by allowing customers to create and manage X.509v3 digital certificates for use in Oracle or third party software. The Certificate Authority is fully standards compliant and is seamlessly integrated with Oracle9iAS Single Sign-On and Oracle Internet Directory. It provides an out-of-the-box PKI solution that is easy to use and manage. Oracle Certificate Authority provides web-based certificate management and administration, as well as XML-based configuration. It leverages the identity management infrastructure, high availability and scalability of the Oracle9i platform.


General Security Enhancements

Oracle9iAS has added many other security enhancements across the entire product.

Oracle HTTP Server

To incorporate the latest optimizations and security features of Apache, the Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) uses Apache (v1.3.27). In addition, OHS has the following security enhancements:

• Session Renegotiation support: This feature will allow individual directories to be protected by different strength encryption - some with weaker encryption, while others with stronger encryption.

• Support for nCipher SSL acceleration hardware: In addition to third-party SSL acceleration solutions from companies like F5, Cisco and SonicWall, Oracle9iAS now supports nCipher’s BHAPI-compliant hardware for deployment on servers running Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) and/or Web Cache. When executed in software, SSL operations place a strain on server CPU resources, causing a reduction in throughput and slower overall performance. The nCipher hardware offloads the SSL key exchange processing from a server’s CPU(s), increasing the number of concurrent SSL connections and improving response times for SSL-protected content. nCipher’s nFast and nForce SSL acceleration devices are available for the Solaris 32-bit, HP-UX 64-bit, Linux (Redhat and SuSe), and Windows platforms. According to nCipher, both devices support several hundred concurrent SSL connections per second. For more information about nCipher products, please visit http://www.ncipher.com.

• Port Tunneling: Oracle9iAS (9.0.2) introduced the AJP protocol for routing between OHS and OC4J. The firewall configuration required knowledge of several ports - especially for deployments that had several OC4J instances behind a firewall being routed to from front-end OHS. This is now simplified with the Port Tunnel, which lets all communication between OHS and OC4J happen on a single port. The port tunnel daemon routes the requests to the appropriate OC4J. Thus only one port has to be opened through the firewall, regardless of the number of backend OC4J.

• OHS -> OC4J SSL Support: OHS and OC4J communication can now be over AJP/SSL, thereby providing end-to-end SSL support for OC4J requests.

Oracle9iAS Web Cache

• Support for client-side SSL certificates: Web Cache now supports applications that require client-side SSL certificates for PKI-based authentication. For HTTPS requests that require client-side certificates, the client browser sends its certificate to Web Cache during the SSL handshake. The cache forwards the request to Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) along with the client’s certificate information inserted in special HTTP request headers. OHS


recognizes the headers and is able to pass user credentials to SSO for authentication purposes.

Enterprise Integration

Oracle9iAS ProcessConnect adds robust secure communication including SSL encryption, digital certificates, and digital signatures. The product ensures guaranteed exactly once delivery, provides end-to-end auditing and tracing, and supports non-repudiation. It also supports Oracle Wallet Manager for management of digital credentials.

Workflow

With Oracle9iAS (9.0.4), Oracle Workflow is SSO enabled out of the box. All users can be authenticated using Oracle9iAS SSO technology with the users stored in ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY. As a result, the default Workflow directory service is based on users stored in ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY.

BC4J

BC4J has added support for implementing application-level security using J2EE security standards (JAAS).

3.4 High Availability and Scalability Oracle9iAS Release 2 (9.0.4) introduces several significant enhancements for High Availability and Scalability:

Death Detection and Re-start: 9.0.4 expands the scope of death detection and restart to cover all Oracle9iAS components. This ensures that if a process or component does go down it will be automatically restarted.

New Load Balancing Algorithms: Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) introduces additional load balancing algorithms, to provide greater flexibility for routing requests across all Middle Tier OC4J processes. New algorithms include random routing and round robin routing both with local affinity or routing weight-based and, metric-based routing. In addition, routing can be configured to favor routing to a local machine over routing to remote nodes.

Hardware Cluster support for Oracle9iAS Infrastructure: 9.0.4 extends the options available to HA enable the Oracle9iAS Infrastructure. 9.0.4 offers Oracle9iAS Infrastructure support for Real Application Clusters (RAC) and simplified use of Cold Cluster Failover (CFC). The Oracle Universal Installer for Oracle9iAS Release 2 (9.0.4) is “cluster-aware” and provides additional installation choices (for RAC and CFC) when it detects a cluster on the hardware where the installation is being attempted.

Simplified CFC support for Oracle9iAS Infrastructure: Oracle9iAS (9.0.2) Infrastructure supported CFC on many platforms by using a workaround. 9.0.4 simplifies and extends support for CFC for Oracle9iAS Infrastructure to all platforms, including support for Oracle Fail Safe on Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS). Cold Failover Cluster is a hardware cluster solution comprising of two nodes, one active and one


passive accessing Oracle9iAS Infrastructure on a common shared storage device. If the active node fails, the passive node transparently takes over with minimal disruption of service.

Figure 4 - Oracle9iAS Infrastructure Cold Failover Cluster Architecture

RAC support for Oracle9iAS Infrastructure: For maximum availability of Oracle9iAS Infrastructure, 9.0.4 provides complete support for RAC. Unlike CFC, RAC enables the Infrastructure to run simultaneously on two or more active nodes of a hardware cluster. If a node goes down, the remaining active nodes of the cluster continue serving requests without any disruption of service. RAC support is also available on all platforms.

Site-to-site Disaster Recovery of Oracle9iAS: Oracle Data Guard is the management, monitoring, and automation software that creates, maintains, manages, and monitors one or more standby databases to protect enterprise data from failures, disasters, errors, and corruptions. It maintains these standby databases as transactionally consistent copies of the production database. CFC and Data Guard together provide the basis for the Oracle9iAS Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. In the DR solution, two geographically dispersed sites are maintained with identical configuration. At any given time, one of the sites is the “primary” site and the other is the “secondary” site. Data Guard is used to maintain a standby database on the secondary site that is equivalent to the Infrastructure database from the primary site. Within each site, Oracle9iAS Infrastructure must be configured with the Cold Failover Cluster (CFC) solution to protect from local host failure. After a failover or switchover operation occurs due to an outage, client requests are routed to the secondary site, which then assumes the primary role.

Oracle9iAS Backup and Recovery: Oracle9iAS (9.0.2) provided a Backup and Recovery tool as a post-release OTN download. This tool is further enhanced and integrated


into 9.0.4 to provide complete backup and recovery of the entire Oracle9iAS middle tier and Infrastructure.

SUMMARY Oracle offers Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 (9.0.4), the next release of its 100% standards-compliant Application Server, as the only complete, integrated, and open Application Server platform in the industry. It simplifies how Internet Applications are integrated and developed; makes Internet Applications fast, reliable, manageable, and secure; and offers substantially lower Total Cost of Ownership.


Integration: ProcessConnect • Single Integrated Tool • Design • Business Activity Modelling • Process Intelligence • Metadata Driven • Business Process Management • Integration Services • J2EE Connector Architecture • B2B Standards Workflow • EM Integration • Notification Mailer and

Params • Wireless Notifications • Expression Based

Subscriptions • Enhanced Event Based Process

Support J2EE Container • JSTL Support • Lightweight JMS • Startup and Shutdown Classes • Logging Web Services • SOAP Headers and API • Fault Support • WSDL Analyzer • PL/SQL, CLOB, BLOB and

XML Support • UDDI V2 Support Oracle HTTP Server • Apache 1.3.27 • Log File Rotation • Security Enhancements TopLink • MW Enhancements • New Architectures and

Message Format BC4J • Support EJB 2.0 local entity

beans • Jakarta Struts

Forms • Access Control via URL

Params • Improved Startup Performance Enhanced Management and Monitoring Developer Kits • CMSDK: Starter Application • CMSDK: File Synch

enhancements • CMSDK: Admin and

Reporting enhancements Portal • OmniPortlets • Web Clipping • New Wizards, Builder Pages • Syndication Services Wireless • Device Protocol and Network

Support via XHTML • J2ME Development and

Provisioning • Intelligent Messaging and

Multi-Media Messaging • Wireless Toolkit • Web Clipping • LBS Enhancements Business Intelligence • Reports within Workflow • Reports: WebDAV/FTP output • Reports: Thin Client • Discoverer: Java Command

Line Tool for EUL maintenance

• Discoverer: Enhanced Graphing

• Discoverer: Enhanced Administration

• Discoverer: Optimized Performance for Complex Folder

Systems Management

• Central Console • Central Port Admin • Archival and Copy Config • Performance Metrics and

Historical Analysis • App Performance

Management • Enhanced Diagnostics and

Log Viewer • JMS, MDB Admin • Data Source Config Caching

• Access and Event Logging • ESI Exception handling • SSL Client Side Certificates • Chunked transfer encoding • Inline Invalidation • URL Rewrite Security • Identity Management • Certificate Authority • ORACLE INTERNET

DIRECTORY: Windows Integration

• ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY: Flexible Password Policy

• ORACLE INTERNET DIRECTORY: Partial Replication

• SSO: Federated Identity Management

• SSO: Multi-level Authentication

• OHS: Session Renegotiation • OHS: SSL HW Acceleration • OHS: Port Tunneling • AJP/SSL High Availability • Infrastructure – RAC, Data

Guard and Cold Failover • New Load Balancing

Algorithms – round robin, random routing, weight-based and metric-based routing

Table 1: Oracle9iAS (9.0.4) Feature Summary


Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 (9.0.4) New Features, April 2003

Author: Ashesh Parekh

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