As Published In September/October 2003

Unparalleled Productivity with Oracle HTML DB

By Kelli Wiseth

In addition to the performance improvements Oracle Database 10g offers in processing speed, the new database provides a cutting-edge development environment, Oracle HTML DB, that offers major productivity benefits when developing the database-centric, departmental Web-based applications.

Oracle HTML DB eliminates much of the "tedium of building Web applications," says Sergio Leunissen of Oracle"s HTML DB group. It lets you construct a consistent UI across all pages and set up the navigational structure—multilevel tabs, a tree, or a menu, for instance—using built-in components and templates. It also handles session state for you, behind the scenes—without coding. "With the simplification or removal of these and many other such tasks, developers can focus on solving the business problem at hand," Leunissen adds.

According to Leunissen, Oracle HTML DB is aimed squarely at building applications that might be used by departmental users who are dealing with a proliferation of desktop databases and spreadsheets to manage their information needs.

"The problem with desktop databases and spreadsheets," says Leunissen, "is that they're not Web-based." Users each have their own version of the data, things get out of sync, and everyone spends a lot of time e-mailing a spreadsheet around to figure out who has the latest version of something.

Using Oracle HTML DB, an IT department of any large enterprise can host a development environment in which everyone in the company can go in and build applications to meet such departmental needs quickly. For example, in just a few minutes, you can upload a spreadsheet into Oracle HTML DB—which creates a table automatically from the column headers (you can modify the table during this process, normalizing the data elements, and create relational tables)—and use one of the wizards to create a running Web-based application. You can create a table (or multiple, relational tables if you like) from that spreadsheet and use one of the Application Builder's wizards to create a running Web-based application. Send out the URL to the other spreadsheet users, and you're done.

How IT Works

The key working areas of Oracle HTML DB include the Application Builder, the SQL Workshop, and the Data Workshop. The Application Builder is for building the pages that will constitute the application; the SQL Workshop allows you to view, query, and create database objects; and the Data Workshop helps you import and export data, for example, spreadsheet data or comma separate value (CSV) data.

Wizard-driven interfaces let developers—even those whose SQL skills might be rusty—build applications quickly. For example, a quick application builder creates a fully functional application based on a table; the application does reporting on the fields in the table, lets users edit values, and does simple charting.

Unlike other departmental Web-oriented development tools, Oracle HTML DB is not a code generator: It creates and stores applications as metadata in a repository. Applications are materialized as metadata in the database; when you run a page in HTML DB, the engine renders the page in real time, based on the data in the metadata repository.

"Oracle HTML DB allows developers to get the user interface they want, because they can control the layout of their screens," says Leunissen. Oracle HTML DB stores templates as HTML and substitutes data and content at runtime. When you change a template, add fields to a form, or change the way a report looks or which columns should comprise a report, metadata is manipulated behind the scenes.

Everything created with Oracle HTML DB, including all the tools of Oracle HTML DB itself, is stored in the database. In addition, HTML DB was built with itself—Application Builder, SQL Workshop, and other tools were created with the underlying HTML DB engine. Because Oracle HTML DB is built into Oracle Database 10g, it benefits from other new features of the database, such as the performance improvements of the new PL/SQL engine. Oracle HTML DB has been implemented in PL/SQL, so it automatically gains the speed improvements of Oracle Database 10g's new PL/SQL Virtual Machine (PVM).

In addition, it supports new SQL and PL/SQL coding capabilities, such as regular expressions (regexp). Using regular expressions can greatly simplify the process of validating data, because in just a few characters, you can express something—the valid format for a telephone number, for example—that would require many lines of code.

As IT continues to work to minimize complexity, contain costs, and consolidate resources, Oracle HTML DB offers a highly productive way to develop Web-based applications that meet departmental information needs—from an enterprise database. As Leunissen says, "Oracle HTML DB offers the ease of use and productivity of a desktop database with the availability and scalability of an enterprise database. All of this, built for the Web."