Bringing Java to the enterprise: Oracle on its Java server strategy

Java is becoming the predominant language for defining and deploying complex business logic across all tiers of the enterprise. Java is uniquely suited to distributed information systems, and clearly critical to the success of Oracle's network computing initiative. No other language combines the features required in these environments. This paper surveys five aspects of our Java product strategy. Unless otherwise stated, these components are included in the Oracle 8.1 software development kit, SDK2, which is under test at a small number of sites. Over the past 20 years, SQL has become the "shape" of the world's store of data. In many ways, Java represents a practical, ubiquitous means for augmenting this structure with the arbitrarily complex operational semantics that only a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language can provide. Such logic is inherently distributed, and may be freely deployed on any network computing tier. The combination of ubiquitous SQL data and Java behavior will generalize relational database management systems into the information servers that are so critical to the future of network computing.