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By Phil Wainewright December 18, 2000 Oracle Corp reached out to online application developers this week with the launch of a development framework and new hosted services. The announcement marked a pre-emptive strike against arch-rival Microsoft in the battle for supremacy in the emerging Internet computing marketplace. Oracle9i Dynamic Services, unveiled on Monday (Dec 11th), is a framework for describing, managing and deploying Internet-based service components such as applications, information feeds and business services. Developers will be able to use it to aggregate Web services within a portal or wireless delivery environment. The framework began shipping this week as part of the Oracle9i database platform. A development kit will be available from next week as a free download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) website. At the same time, Oracle launched itself as a developer services provider (DSP), introducing two hosted development environments for the creation of applications using the dynamic services framework. OTN-registered developers — of whom Oracle claims there are currently more than 1.2 million — can use the free-of-charge services to develop and deploy applications or other Web services for delivery using Oracle's enterprise portal or wireless environments. The hosted Oracle Portal service can also be used to build and deploy a complete enterprise portal. Dot-net, dot-now Oracle executives stressed the "dot-now" availability of the vendor's Web services framework, in contrast to the as-yet undelivered vision of Microsoft .Net, which was announced in June this year — see related ASPnews.com story, Microsoft Maps Out a Net-Centric Future, Jun 24th 2000. But in doing so, they were not comparing like with like. Although never mapped out with the same formality, Oracle has been working to its own .Net-style vision ever since CEO Larry Ellison declared back in 1995 that network computing would render the PC obsolete. That gives this week's Dynamic Services announcement a strong pedigree going back at least three years — the underlying technology comes from Oracle WebDB, the online application assembly tool that was renamed Oracle Portal earlier this year, and which has always been an important ingredient in Oracle's Internet computing roadmap. See related ASPnews.com story, Oracle hones net platform strategy, Nov 13th 1998. But Oracle, just like Microsoft, is still filling in the detail of its overall vision. The Dynamic Services framework is in effect a riposte to Microsoft's .Net framework for assembling Web services, an already-launched platform for which a developer kit is already available. Apart from the choice of the underlying platform — each ties the developer to the vendor's environment — the technologies involved are remarkably similar. Both pledge conformity to accepted or proposed standards such as HTTP, XML, SOAP and UDDI. Developer appeal With so much dependence on standards, the vital differentiator for these rival frameworks comes down not to what they contain, but to their developer appeal. In sheer bulk numbers, Microsoft has a significant edge here, with millions of developers already familiar with the Windows environment, and many of them using its tools. All it has to do is migrate them to its .Net framework, virtually without them noticing what is happening. Despite the large installed base achieved by Oracle's database platform, its developer community is much smaller — in large part because of the higher cost of the Oracle product. Oracle must win over the hearts and minds of Windows developers if it is to supplant Microsoft's dominance and win primacy in the Internet computing environment. In that context, the launch of a hosted development service is a masterstroke. The free service instantly undercuts Microsoft's tools, while fostering a community where developers can exchange ideas and component services. Unlike Microsoft, Oracle has no desktop tools revenues to protect. That leaves it free to exploit the potential of collaborative Internet-based development in a strategy that Microsoft will be highly reluctant to emulate. The service also offers a practical solution to a problem that many corporate developers currently face, namely how to quickly implement enterprise portal and wireless services. Microsoft Corp meanwhile had its attentions focussed on more esoteric programming challenges this week, as it celebrated the release to production of Biztalk Server. Probably the biggest of the big guns in the Microsoft .Net arsenal, Biztalk promises to enable the co-ordination of multiple collaborating Web services across multiple participants — a kind of multi-tiered version of Oracle's current Dynamic Services platform. But priced at $25,000 per processor, it will be serving a much more select constituency than the Oracle services. Multi-tenant engine Another noteworthy announcement this week came Dec 13th as Lawson Software launched its @Business Service Provider Platform, an implementation of its e-business application suite specifically engineered for ASPs and other online service providers. Lawson has 46 application and business service provider partners around the world that build market-tailored e-service solutions based on its e-business applications. The new @Business Platform exploits the highly modular, Web services architecture of the Lawson suite to allow partners to assemble the precise components they need for each specific offering. As such, it exemplifies the approach to online application creation described in the latest ASPnews.com report — launched in a new edition this week — Internet Application Engines. This week saw Lawson introduction a multi-tenancy component, which enables providers to host multiple customers on a single set of Lawson applications. Under a multi-tenancy scheme, the application code is shared by multiple organisations, even though the processes and data specific to each organisation remains completely separate and secure. It is analagous to shared office blocks, where several companies share the same building and facilities, even though they each occupy separate, secure office suites. A multi-tenancy application architecture has often been cited as a prerequisite for cost-effective ASP services. Lawson's introduction of it as a standard option demonstrates its commitment and belief in the ASP delivery model. This review of the week's news highlights is by ASPnews.com founder and managing editor Phil Wainewright. A comprehensive news digest is published every month in the ASP News Review newsletter, available exclusively to subscribers. |