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Oracle Embraces Mozilla
kiggs writes "According to this article from eWeek, Oracle Corp. is ready to extend its 'Linux Everywhere' campaign to client systems. At next week's LinuxWorld in New York, Oracle will announce that it will enable the Mozilla open-source Web browser to run Oracle applications in the coming year.
Dave Dargo, vice president of Oracle's Linux Program Office and the Performance Engineering team within its Platform Technologies Division, says that Oracle will look to expand its 1.5-year-old Linux support program by supporting Linux not just as a server but as a client."
I work there and would bet it will be a long time before this works as planned. Way too many internal sights require IE to work at all. We are still at a point where you can NOT have a purely Linux desktop and still get your daily work completed.
I would not say Oracle Apps works on standards like the poster above was explaining either - it requires a Java plugin (very similar to - and based on Sun's Java Plugin) called JInitiator. JInitiator has to be loaded and used by the browser so it it not like any browser can be a client... unless Jinit is ported to the platform and plugin architecture.
It will be a happy day when we can actually USE Linux on the desktop at work though.
Oralce's apps are an entire suite of Business applications.
Order Entry, Accounts Receivable/Payable, Inventory, HR.
While not perfect, for the most part its good stuff.
These apps are currently launched as applets through a custom JVM plugin called Jinitiator launched through IE.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Oracle has a complete end-to-end ERP/CRM application called Applicaitons 11i which uses a combination of java applets (delivered through Forms Server 6i) JSP's (delivered through apache) etc. The problem is that some of their HTML code makes windows IE only calls (even though they officially support the Mac running IE) using the object tag instead of applet tags, etc. Also, they have a ton of other web apps (Discoverer, their iAS application server and portal server, etc.) all with IE only stuff in them.
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
A web page that requires some specific browser is hopelessly broken by my definition.
Oracle's web pages do not require a specific browser, their applications do.
The article was not very clear on this.
Oracle does have some web applications (server-side code generating dynamic html pages), like their self-serivce stuff and the e-commerce iStores product.
However, what most of us that use Oracle applications consider to be the "applictions" are the business applictions.
These are things like accounting AR/AP, orders, inventory, HR, GL, etc. This stuff already uses client side Java/swing, presumably to make it a cross-platform product.
The problem is that up until now these applications use a custom Java virtual machine called Jinitiator to launch, and it only works on IE.
If they intend to have this stuff run on Linux, then they need to either port Jinitiator, of fix the apps so they can use a standard JVM.
The article was rather vague on which route they are taking.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
JInitiator (even the pre-Mozilla versions) work like a charm on Mozilla - I use it day in and day out. Ofcourse the old installers don't recognize Mozilla (they only recognize IE and Netscape 4.x) but on Windows you can copy the plugin DLLs to your Mozilla plugins directory. Obviously we don't want to suggest these "hacks" to customers and so this would be an example where we improve the installer to do the right thing and place the seal of Oracle support. This is true even on Linux and Solaris because at it's core JInitiator is Java-based.
The newer self-service applications built in the past three years all work on Mozilla. They are built with UIX which elminates all the raw HTML coding from our Apps developers. The core technology team ensures compliance across all browsers including Mozilla. Just FYI this also helps us support a host of PDAs and smartphones. The same is true for ADF which is simply the next generation of UIX and related tools.
Disclaimer: I work at Oracle in the applications technologies division but these statements are mine and do not reflect Oracle's position. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.