Oracle expands Web access
Jason Romney (jromney@werple.mira.net.au)
Mon, 23 Oct 1995 01:29:02 +1000 (EST)
PC Week Online
September 25, 1995
ORACLE EXPANDS WORLD-WIDE WEB ACCESS
By Erica Schroeder
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PHILADELPHIA -- Seeking to take Internet computing to a new level,
Oracle Corp. last week unveiled three products for broadening data
access and transmission over the World-Wide Web.
At its International Oracle User Group conference here, the Redwood
Shores, Calif., firm debuted Web Server, an Internet database and
content server; Web Station, a client browser; and Web Options, which
allows current Oracle7 applications to be delivered over the Internet.
Web Options also includes Oracle Cash, for buying services online, and
Oracle Online CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), for
online and enterprise services.
With these products, Oracle is aiming to boost current limitations of
both Web server and browser technology, including client-side data
validation, indexing, distributed data support, ad hoc query
capability, and multimedia support, officials said.
The tools are an improvement over what many Oracle customers at last
week's conference said they have seen so far on the Internet.
"Being able to create objects and reuse them for Internet development
was the most interesting thing they showed,'' said Flavia Golden,
database administrator for Children's Hospital, in Boston. "We're just
getting into the Internet, and based on what I've seen, [the Oracle
products] looked pretty good.''
Web Server, integrated into the Oracle7 Release 7.3 relational DBMS,
is a full HTTP server that provides access to CORBA objects. The
software, which runs on Windows NT and Solaris, can generate Hypertext
Markup Language pages dynamically from documents created in a variety
of development environments, including Oracle PowerObjects, Powersoft
Corp.'s PowerBuilder, or Gupta Corp.'s SQLWindows.
In addition to text-based data, Web Server can deliver MPEG video over
the Internet via a switched Ethernet network, provided the client has
an MPEG decoder capability.
Oracle expects to deliver software-based video playback in about a
year, said Marc Benioff, senior vice president of Oracle's Internet
and Workgroup Technology Division.
The video capabilities are based on the Media Server architecture from
Oracle's New Media Division, which is working to deliver within a year
video over 28.8K-bps modem connections to provide video services to a
wider user base, said Farzahd Dibachi, senior vice president of the
division.
On the client side, Web Station operates as a local HTTP server and
includes a 300K-byte Blaze SQL database for local data storage; DMML,
a BASIC-, SQL-, and HTML-compatible scripting language; Network
Loadable Objects; and drag-and-drop layout features for building
applications.
Web Station will begin beta testing next month and will be free to
users when it ships in December. Web Server will begin beta tests in
November and is slated for release early next year. Web Options is
being beta tested now and will be released by year's end. Prices for
Web Server and Web Options have not been set.
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JF