Oracle Will Rewrite Applications As Components
(04/06/98; 5:53 p.m. EST)
By John Foley and Rich Levin, InformationWeek
Oracle said it plans to rewrite its entire application
suite as a collection of Java components, signaling a
wholesale migration of its application source code to
the object model. The rewrite plans, to be unveiled at
next month's Oracle Applications User Group
conference in San Diego, will be made possible by an
update of Oracle's Designer/2000 modeling tool.
"We think apps should be developed through data
models and process models, not through coding of any
kind, including Java," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said
in an interview Friday. The object model will appear in
version 12 of Oracle's applications, which are due by
mid-1999.
Version 2.1 of Designer/2000, which is slated to ship
this month, will generate 100 percent of an
application's source code from an object model,
compared with about 70 percent of code with the
current release. Ellison called the Designer/2000
upgrade "the most important product Oracle has
developed since the database."
Oracle's strategy could put it in a stronger position to
deliver application integration than its enterprise
resource planning competitors. In theory, IT shops
could take the same model- and repository-driven
tools used to build Oracle's enterprise resource
planning solutions and extend, integrate, or redesign
applications into custom systems and vertical business
processes. But analysts said it won't be easy.
"It's going to benefit IT shops that adopt the [Oracle]
tools," said Michael Barnes, an analyst with the
Hurwitz Group. "But just learning the model is going to
take an enormous amount of time."
Meanwhile, Oracle's stock was down 6.5 percent on
Friday, in part due to a report that network computers
(NCs) are not selling as well as analysts -- and Ellison
himself -- had once forecast. Nevertheless, Ellison
said companies are rapidly moving toward network
computing, using low-cost PCs instead of NCs.
"Let's not confuse the network computer with network
computing," he said. "Network computing is winning
overwhelmingly." |
