As Published In January/February 2004

Learn what's happening with Oracle's most dynamic online community.

Community News

From the Editor Welcome to the inaugural edition of Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Community Bulletin, a new, regularly published special section in Oracle Magazine. This section will serve as your central source of information about new services, software, sample code, and technical articles available from OTN, the world's largest online community for Oracle developers, database administrators (DBAs), and database architects.Remember, you can also have OTN news delivered straight to your desktop via our RSS newsfeed. Enjoy. Justin Kestelyn, OTN Editor in Chief justin.kestelyn@oracle.com

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Book lovers, this one is for you: OTN members can now browse a broad selection of new technical books about Oracle Database 10g, by top experts, that are currently or will soon be available for preordering at amazon.com/oracle.

According to Sheila Cepero, manager of Oracle's Publishers Program, the Oracle Database 10g book program is the most successful ever for any Oracle product launch, consisting of 50 books from 37 authors, many of which will be available just as Oracle's 10g products are released. Titles include Robert Freeman's Oracle Database 10g New Features, from Oracle Press (from which a beta 1 "sneak peak" was published on OTN in September), Oracle Database 10g Linux Administration, by Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's "Mr. Linux" (also from Oracle Press), and Oracle Essentials Oracle 10g, by Robert Stackowiak (O'Reilly & Associates).

"Oracle's Publishers Program has made a big impact, with more than 10 of the top publishing houses involved and more than 30 titles due to publish within the first quarter of product release [March 2004]," says Cepero. "In past releases, it would have taken significantly longer to see these books in the marketplace. This is a major breakthrough in getting Oracle Database 10g product information out to the customers and technologists who are hungry for it."

Some of the authors in the program will be familiar to OTN members. Alice Rischert, for example, whose book Oracle SQL by Example is forthcoming from Prentice Hall, is the author of "Writing Better SQL Using Regular Expressions," the most popular technical article among OTN members so far this year. Jonathan Gennick and Don Burleson, who are OTN members themselves, have pitched in about support for hierarchical queries and database self-management respectively. And Lannes Morris-Murphy, author of the soon-to-be-published Introduction to Oracle 10g SQL, offers the public a technical overview of automatic storage management in Oracle Database 10g.

For titles and free sample chapters, visit OTN's Oracle 10g Bookstore at otn.oracle.com/books/10g_books.html.

At Your Service
OTN provides resources to help developers learn about Oracle Application Server 10g, including product documentation, white papers, data sheets, and more. For some tasks, though, the best resource is code, so OTN developers have built a sample application that shows off some key features of Oracle Application Server 10g. The application, called the Financial Brokerage Service 10g (FBS 10g), simulates an online brokerage where users can trade stocks, read financial news, and manage their portfolios.

Most Popular* Content on OTN Sample Code otn.oracle.com/sample_code 1. JDBC & SQLJ Samples Index 2. Oracle Forms Samples Index 3. Oracle9i Java Stored Procedure Samples Index 4. PL/SQL Samples Index 5. Basic JDBC Samples Tutorials Tutorials otn.oracle.com/sample_code/tutorials/OTN_Tutorials.html 1. Understanding Oracle XML DB 2. J2EE Virtual Shopping Mall 1.3 3. Financial Brokerage Service 10g 4. Installing Oracle9i Database on Red Hat Linux 9 5. Financial Brokerage Service Technical Articles otn.oracle.com/oramag/webcolumns/2003 1. "Writing Better SQL Using Regular Expressions," by Alice Rischert 2. "Self-Tuning Oracle9i Database: Oracle SGA," by Don Burleson 3. "Tuning the Oracle9i Database on Linux," by Bert Scalzo 4. "New CONNECT BY- Features in Oracle Database 10g," by Jonathan Gennick 5. "Jump-Start Your Java Development on Linux, Part 2: Starting Out," by Robert Clevenger *For the three-month period ending October 31, 2003

FBS 10g illustrates several interesting Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) 10g features, including:

• Web Services Endpoints. This feature, introduced in Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 2.1, gives developers more bang for their beans by making EJBs accessible to clients as Web services. A client communicates with a Web service via a request-response protocol, and an endpoint represents the ultimate destination of a client request, providing an interface to the service's methods. Support for endpoints in EJBs makes it easy for developers to integrate J2EE applications with Web services.
• Timer Service. Timer events enable an application to execute program logic at a specified time, after a specified amount of elapsed time, or at a specified interval. OTN developers used timer events in FBS 10g to enable the system administrator to monitor trade activity. At a specified interval, the system creates an e-mail message listing the trades executed in that interval and sends it to the administrator. The administrator can set or change the interval at any time to receive updates more or less frequently.
• Message-Driven Beans (MDBs). In FBS 10g, alerts can be generated by numerous application modules, and OTN developers used MDBs to centralize the alert mechanism. By removing the tight coupling between executing a trade transaction and sending back the user response, the application can serve multiple users without compromising response times. MDBs allow asynchronous processing and thereby reduce wait time for customers.

New Content & Code

New Technical Content
otn.oracle.com/oramag/webcolumns/2003

Best of OracleWorld 2003: The Most Popular Technical Sessions
We've compiled a list of the 10 most popular technical sessions at OracleWorld 2003—as well as the top five Oracle Application Server tech sessions—including accompanying presentations and/or white papers.

Migrate Your Notes Applications to J2EE and Oracle Collaboration Suite
With the help of this MVC-based methodology, migrating Lotus Notes apps to J2EE for deployment on Oracle Collaboration Suite is straightforward.

Preview: Oracle Database 10g New Features
This preview chapter from the forthcoming Oracle Press book Oracle Database 10g New Features includes important new information about server-manageability features in the new release.

Jump-Start Your Java Development on Linux, Part 2: Starting Out
In the second installment of our hands-on guide to developing and deploying Java client applications on Linux, Robert Clevenger, principal product manager for Oracle Java Tools, addresses the command-line approach to development.

OTN Locator OTN home otn.oracle.com Product downloads otn.oracle.com/software Product information otn.oracle.com/products OTN technology centers otn.oracle.com/tech Hosted development environments otn.oracle.com/hosted_dev OTN Forums forums.oracle.com Sample code otn.oracle.com/sample_code

Fast Track to Single Sign-On
Learn how to fast track your Single Sign-On development efforts with mod_osso and dynamic directives in Oracle Application Server.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3: An Early Look
Brian Stevens, vice president of operating-system development at Red Hat, discusses RHEL 3 capa-bilities (for the first time anywhere), the status of the Linux 2.6 kernel, and the impact of collaborative kernel development between Red Hat and Oracle.

Sample Code
otn.oracle.com/sample_code

Virtual Shopping Mall 1.3
This sample application takes advantage of J2EE 1.3 features such as EJB 2.0 and Servlets 2.3 and demonstrates internationalization techniques, the Apache Struts Framework, and most common J2EE Design Patterns.

ODP.NET XML Support
This new Relational Data Sample and XML View Sample demonstrate how you can use the new XML features in ODP.NET version 9.2.0.4 to access and manipulate relational data through XML.

JSP 2.0 How-Tos
These new JSP 2.0 how-to documents explain how to implement JSP 2.0 Simple Tag Handler and Tag Files.

Web-Services How-Tos
Learn how to develop RPC Literal Web Services and Document Literal Web Services using the top-down approach.

Tutorial: Understanding Oracle XML DB
Are you looking to combine the power of XML with the advantages of relational-database technology? The new four-part OTN Tutorial series "Understanding Oracle XML DB" helps you do just that.