PL/SQL or Java for web development

[digi_newbie]

I have been tasked to provide the advantages/comparison of using Java
over PL/SQL for developing a web application to interact with an
Oracle database and am struggling to find any resources on the web
which compare the two.

Apart from myself the organisation does not have any Java/J2EE
developers and only a few who can code PL/SQL. I recently worked on a
project developing web pages using PL/SQL and found it a backward step
putting the HTML code in with the PL/SQL procedure.

My initial thoughts are:

Java
-J2EE has the advantage of separation of view and model (MVC)
-Platform Independent
-Internationalisation
-Large number of Java web developers
-Object Orientated nature of Java

PL/SQL
-Some experience in house
I am strongly leaning towards J2EE, but really need some better
reasons than my own feelings and intuition to be able to show those
who make the decisions!

Thanks in advance

Andrew

[D Rolfe]

digi_newbie wrote:

I have been tasked to provide the advantages/comparison of using Java
over PL/SQL for developing a web application to interact with an
Oracle database and am struggling to find any resources on the web
which compare the two.

Apart from myself the organisation does not have any Java/J2EE
developers and only a few who can code PL/SQL. I recently worked on a
project developing web pages using PL/SQL and found it a backward step
putting the HTML code in with the PL/SQL procedure.

My initial thoughts are:

Java
-J2EE has the advantage of separation of view and model (MVC)
-Platform Independent
-Internationalisation
-Large number of Java web developers
-Object Orientated nature of Java

PL/SQL
-Some experience in house
I am strongly leaning towards J2EE, but really need some better
reasons than my own feelings and intuition to be able to show those
who make the decisions!

If I were you I would avoid trying to use PL/SQL to generate web pages
directly. Use PL/SQL procedures to do all the database 'grunt' work and
let Java run the web side of things.

I would recommend that you write a library of PL/SQL procedures that
perform the business functions and then get Java to call them. This
means that your Java developers don't need to know everything about the
database schema or how to write optimised queries against oracle etc -
they just need to know which stored procedure they call to accomplish
which task. Given that this may be their first Java project I suspect
they'll have enough to worry about.......

Disclaimer: I work for a company that makes a product that writes Java
source code to run PL/SQL, so of course I'd recommend that you use Java
to call PL/SQL procs.......

David Rolfe
Orinda Software
Dublin, Ireland
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
OrindaBuild writes Java source code to run PL/SQL Procedures.
www.orindasoft.com

[Jaggie]

Depends very much on the type of application. HTML DB might well be
an option, have a look:

http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p...12691263416650,

This site is run fully in HTML DB I believe and is solid as a rock.
Also there is some good info on plsql web pages etc - definitely a
good place to start.

[Jaggie]

Sorry, in addition, ypi can do MVC with pl/sql too. It is just a
matter of separating the packages. PL/SQL is platform independant -
it runs in the dbase - it cares not what OS it is on.
Internationalisation is all done for you inside the db, pl/sql is to
some degree OO. The only advantage I see in your list is that you
have a large number of java developers.

In saying that you really do need to write all the db interaction code
in plsql packages anyway so you will require plsql coding.