Introducing the Power of iAS

Many of the benefits of iAS are derived from its simple three-tier computing model: client, application server, and database are on separate tiers. As the middle tier, iAS provides the optimal interface between clients and databases:

• Application logic is centralized and can be easily maintained.
• The architectural design of the middle tier is optimized for server functions, including access to a database.

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Delivering Web Content

iAS can help you quickly and economically:

• Deliver Internet information.
• Accelerate Internet delivery.
• Deliver Intranet information.

Delivering Internet Information

Using the proven technology of the Oracle HTTP Server powered by Apache, iAS delivers static content such as HTML pages, XML data, and text files.

Using the Oracle HTTP Server plug-ins ("mods"), iAS supports all of the current Internet application technologies to deliver dynamic content such as Java servlets, JavaServer pages, PL/SQL Server pages, and CGI scripts using Perl.

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Accelerating Internet Delivery

iAS accelerates delivery of Web pages via Oracle8i Cache to provide database caching in the middle tier, reducing the load on the back-end database instance, and avoiding network roundtrips for read-only data.

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Delivering Intranet Information

In internal or external corporate intranets, iAS easily delivers business documents, including word-processed documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, and various documents in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (.pdf).

iAS delivers business intelligence to thin clients via Reports services, which display reports developed with Oracle Reports Developer that pull data directly from the database.

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Processing Transactions

iAS supports both stateless and stateful transactions:

Stateless transactions consist of a request and a response. No information about the user (the requestor) is tracked by the system, and each transaction is unrelated to those that precede or follow it.

Stateful transactions are similar to database sessions in that information about the user (the initiator of the transaction) is tracked by the system for one or more phases of the transaction.The system also tracks the state (the set of conditions at a given moment) of one or more preceding events in the sequence of a transaction.

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Summary of Supported Technologies and Programming Languages

For delivering Web content, transaction processing, and program development and deployment, iAS components support the following technologies and programming languages:

For a description of each iAS service and element, and for information about developing and deploying applications in iAS, see Oracle Internet Application Server Overview Guide.

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