By Talila Baron
Oracle Corp. this week will discuss plans for enabling online transaction processing over the Internet and adding World Wide Web capabilities to its applications and development tools.
At a briefing in Millbrae, Calif., on Tuesday, Oracle will focus on how its corporate customers can develop intranets to connect to large-scale database servers, said Mark Jarvis, vice president of server marketing with the Redwood Shores, Calif., company.
Forming the cornerstone of Oracle's Internet efforts are new or upgraded development tools such as Javelin, Developer/2000 2.0 and PowerObjects 2.0.
Javelin, an integrated Java development environment, is due early next year, officials said.
"Javelin would support the assembly of Java classes and applets," said Dennis Moore, a vice president of product marketing at Oracle. "It's a visual component factory to enable you to build Java components."
The new tool will enable developers to drag and drop an applet into a Developer/2000 application and have it run automatically, Moore said. Javelin also will include a class library, code editor, layout editor and scripting environment, so users can build methods manually, he said.
Upcoming releases of Developer/2000 2.0 and Designer/2000 2.0 also will support the automatic creation of Java applets running on thin clients, Oracle officials said.
"For internal clients, Developer/2000 2.0 would allow us to run a thin client that runs a Java applet," said a senior applications developer with a large retail company in Raleigh, N.C., who requested anonymity. "So if we need to upgrade the application, we upgrade the server, not the client."
Another key component of Oracle's intranet strategy, PowerObjects 2.0, will let developers embed Web page content in client/server applications. PowerObjects 2.0 is due to ship this summer and will give users the ability to use Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator browser and automatically invoke a Web page within a container of the browser.
Also at the Oracle briefing this week:
* Oracle will discuss plans for using VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) to incorporate data in three-dimensional page designs. By adding VRML capabilities, browser users will be able to view spatial data and complex reports in 3-D generated by such products as Oracle Express Server, expected to be integrated with Oracle's WebServer 2.0.
* Oracle will demonstrate a new collaborative application, different from its InterOffice groupware.
* Several partners will announce plans to write or port applications that support Oracle's Web Request Broker API, sources said.
Additional reporting by Michael Moeller
VMRL SUPPORT lets Oracle users view spatial data in 3-D.