Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

A reader recently asked where she could find a summary of the E-Business Suite Release 12 technology stack components for different R12 releases.  As it turns out, there's a long answer to this deceptively-simple question.  This level of information is spread in a variety of release-specific Notes, making it tricky to compare which components were delivered as part of each Apps 12 Rapid Install. 

Here's a high-level architectural diagram showing an overview of the major techstack components in R12:

It's possible to add on additional database options not shown above, including 11g Advanced Compression, 11g Advanced Security, and others. 

Here's a summary of the versions for the important major techstack components that were included in the Rapid Install footprints for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12:

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Microsoft Windows 7 has been getting a lot of headlines recently.  This seems to have triggered an small but noticeable increase in questions about our plans for certifying this operating system for E-Business Suite desktop clients. 

We're working with pre-release versions of Windows 7 right now.  For the usual reasons that regular readers could have predicted, I can't share any certification schedules or date estimates here. I can provide an interim update on the following Win7 questions:

1. Which EBS releases will be certified with Windows 7?
2. Which browsers will be certified?
3. Will Oracle JInitiator Be certified for EBS on Windows 7?
4. Which Windows 7 editions will be certified?
5. What about Windows 7E?
6. What about Windows XP Mode?

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Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) is now certified for end-user desktops connecting to the E-Business Suite Release 11i, 12.0, and 12.1.  Supported Windows browsers are Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Firefox 3.0, with the following minimum prerequisites:

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We've covered the impending demise of JInitiator and the certification of the native Sun Java client in many articles already.  With the sun setting on Oracle Jinitiator next month, this is a good time to summarize the essentials about running Windows-based Java clients with the E-Business Suite:

1. Sun's Java Runtime Engine (JRE) is certified with both EBS 11i and 12
2. JInitiator 1.3 will be desupported for E-Business Suite customers at the end of July 2009
3. JInitiator 1.1.8 was desupported at the end of December, 2008
4. JInitiator cannot be run on Vista Desktops

If you haven't already started migrating your E-Business Suite end-users to the native Sun JRE plug-in, I'd strongly recommend that you begin this process immediately.

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As with my previous post about the desupport of Sun's Java 1.4 release, you should be aware that the equivalent end-of-life (EOL) for Sun's J2SE 1.5 is coming up in October 2009.

Implications for E-Business Suite Users

Here are the implications if your Apps 11i or 12 environments are running on servers with J2SE 1.5:

• If you log a Service Request for your environment, Oracle will continue to perform its usual diagnosis, triage, and search through our knowledge base for existing patches and workarounds.   This assistance may be constrained by limited access to a small number of remaining environments running J2SE 1.5.  It is extremely unlikely that we will issue new Apps patches for new compatibility issues identified with the E-Business Suite and J2SE 1.5.

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Our E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group released a new product, the Application Change Management Pack (ACMP), and a new version of their Application Management Pack (AMP) for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 4 earlier this month.  They've just followed this up with a new certification with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 5.

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Oracle Advanced Security is an optional licenced Oracle 11gR1 Database add-on.  Oracle Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) offers two different features:  column encryption and tablespace encryption.  We certified the TDE column encryption feature with the E-Business Suite last year.  We're pleased to expand our 11gR1 Database certification to include the tablespace encryption feature.  Tablespace Encryption 11.1.0.7 is now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i.

What is Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) ?

Oracle Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) allows you to protect data at rest. TDE helps address privacy and PCI requirements by encrypting personally identifiable information (PII) such as Social Security numbers and credit card numbers.

TDE is completely transparent to existing applications with no triggers, views or other application changes required. Data is transparently encrypted when written to disk and transparently decrypted after an application user has successfully authenticated and passed all authorization checks. Authorization checks include verifying the user has the necessary select and update privileges on the application table and checking Database Vault, Label Security and Virtual Private Database enforcement policies.

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Our panel of guest contributors to this blog continues to expand.  I'm pleased to welcome Allison Sparshott, another member of my EBS Certifications team, to our ever-growing group of authors.

Allison Sparshott is a Principal Software Engineer in the Applications Technology Integration organization under Cliff Godwin. Since joining the Applications Technology Integration team in June 2005, she has been responsible for a variety of technology certifications from Web Browser to Oracle Application Server and Database.

Allison has been with Oracle since 1994. She began her Oracle career in the support organisation in EMEA where she worked for four years supporting the Applications Technology products. She was then responsible for the inception, development and running of the EMEA Applications Test Centre, responsible for testing Oracle Applications in the National languages for EMEA. She then went on to work for two years in the DDR team, working with MLS (Multi-Lingual Support) and the UTF8/Unicode character set, creating configuration documentation and FAQs for UTF8 with Oracle Applications. She then worked for 3 years as a Product Manager for Oracle Workflow, working on product feature design in the Worklow Notifications area and assisting support in resolving technical issues with Oracle Workflow and developing a 'Supporting Oracle Workflow' course for support analysts.

Many products within the Oracle E-Business Suite have screens that are built with Oracle Forms.  Oracle Forms can be run in either servlet mode or socket mode.  Apps 11i is based on Forms 6i and is configured to run in socket mode by default.  Apps 12 is based on Forms 10g and is configured to run in servlet mode by default. What are these modes, and which is better?

What is Forms Servlet Mode?

The Forms Listener Servlet is a Java servlet that delivers the ability to run Oracle Forms applications over HTTP and HTTPS connections. It manages the creation of a Forms Server Runtime process for each client, as well as network communications between the client and its associated Forms Server Runtime process.

The desktop client sends HTTP requests and receives HTTP responses from the web server. The HTTP Listener on the web server acts as the network endpoint for the client, keeping other servers and ports from being exposed at the firewall.

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The last major update to the E-Business Suite Release 11i's technology stack was released in late 2007.  This is available via the Applications Technology Group Rollup Patchset 6, also known as ATG RUP 6.  Since then, we've been a little preoccupied with Apps 12.  Now that we've gotten three new R12 releases under our belts, our attentions are turning back to Apps 11i.

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Oracle Tutor enables you to create, customize, and maintain process documentation, training, and reference materials related to Oracle Applications.  Several seasons have passed since Oracle Tutor was last mentioned tangentially on this blog.  Our Tutor Development team hasn't been dormant, though.  They've just released two new patches with the following updates for Oracle Tutor:

• Support for Word 2007
• Support for Microsoft Vista desktop clients
• Global font change to Arial
• Actor Bar color changed to blue in Word documents

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As of today, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is still not certified with either Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i or 12.  Our standing recommendation is that your desktop administrators use Microsoft's IE8 Blocker Toolkit to prevent your end-users from inadvertently upgrading to IE8.  For full details about this toolkit, see:

• IE8 Blocker Toolkit Available Today! (Microsoft website)

We recommend that you deploy this as soon as possible, to prevent your EBS users from accidentally upgrading their desktops to IE 8. 

What's Holding Up this EBS Certification?

If you recall from our previous updates, the way that we currently launch Forms-based EBS products is not workable in IE8.  We need to do the following things before IE8 can be considered certified with the respective E-Business Suite releases:

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Our Applications Platforms Group has just released a new split configuration for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i.  Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10.2 is now certified with the 10gR2 Database version 10.2.0.4 on the IBM Linux on Power and IBM Linux on System z (formerly known as 'zSeries Based Linux') platforms. Operating systems covered are:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and 5
• Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9 and 10

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[June 12, 2009 Update: Added link to JDK 1.6 Note 444462.1]

If you run Java-based applications in your organization, you're aware that you may wish to optionally update the Java Development Kit (JDK) libraries periodically to get the latest fixes for security, stability, and performance.  This applies to the E-Business Suite, naturally, so we regularly release new certifications for the latest Java releases for EBS.

Perhaps lesser-known is that this also applies to external servers running Oracle Fusion Middleware -- also known as Oracle Application Server 10g.  You may have deployed Oracle Application Server 10g on one or more application tier servers to use Discoverer, Single Sign-On, Oracle Internet Directory, Portal, or other Fusion Middleware services with the E-Business Suite.

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Web Applications Desktop Integration (Web ADI) is an enterprise framework for integrating the Oracle E-Business Suite with desktop applications. It's a Self-Service Oracle Application that lets you download and upload selected data between EBS products and  Microsoft Excel.  It allows you to modify bulk data in Microsoft Excel, working either online or offline, and upload the modified data using Web ADI.  It also allows you to generate Microsoft Word documents for mail merges.

What's Coming for Web ADI?

Are you interested in integrating EBS application with desktop application using Oracle’s Web ADI framework? Are you interested in creating custom Web ADI integrators with the ability to define validations, lookups, and business rules? Well, you're in the right place! The Oracle Applications Technology Group is working on providing a new development framework to create and manage custom desktop integrators.

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