Toon Koppelaars, Centraal Boekhuis

Toon Koppelaars studied computer science at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He is a long-time Oracle technology user, having used the Oracle database and tools software since 1987, version 4. During his career he has been involved in both application development (terminal/host in the early days, GUI client/server later on, and J2EE nowadays), as well as database administration. His interest areas include performance tuning (ensuring scalability, SQL-tuning), architecting applications in a database-centric way, and database modeling. Within the database modeling area, the mathematical specification and robust implementation of database models including the data integrity constraints (often referred to as business rules) is one of his special interest areas.

He is currently employed as a senior IT architect at Centraal Boekhuis B.V., a well known Oracle shop in The Netherlands. Toon is also a frequent presenter at Oracle related conferences.

Presentation: "A database-centric approach to J2EE application development (Where should code go: Java or PL/SQL?)"

Track: Relational Databases

Time: Monday 17:00 - 17:45

Location: SAS Nortvegia

Abstract:

Building a J2EE/Java application may seem a daunting task at first. Java, object oriented programming itself, is truly different, and cannot be compared with PL/SQL (which can be classified as an easy to learn programming language). There are many new technologies one has to explore and learn: for example, various frameworks to enable the Model-View-Control design pattern, HTTP, the stateless-protocol, HTML in the browser, including JavaScript, JDeveloper, Oracle's strategic IDE. Will you ever be able to grasp all this new technology? There are ways to ease this daunting task: in particular for traditional Oracle client/server shops. The most successful way is to adopt a database-centric approach. The Oracle server has come a long way and various features such as Virtual Private Database (VPD), Instead Of Triggers (IOT), (updateable) views, Ref Cursors, Pipelined Table Functions and Packaged Procedures today enable you to implement the majority of all involved application logic into the well known database server. Strongly preferring stored PL/SQL to Java when deciding on where code should go, will enable a very thin J2EE/Java layer. By never writing a line of Java code that could have been a line of PL/SQL code, you will considerably reduce the risk in your J2EE project.

In order to deal in a structured way with the question in the title above, we will first present a model of the J2EE technology stack from the viewpoint of 'code execution environments'. This will enable us to talk about the where of code execution. Next we will develop a generic classification scheme for code (irrespective of where the code ends up running). This will enable us to talk about what code. We can then map code onto the technology stack. This paper will discuss how traditional Oracle client/server shops can approach the J2EE world using a database-centric mapping. We explain in more detail how we successfully apply this strategy in all of our J2EE application development efforts.

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