Oracle 8i and JDeveloper Suite
By Ken North
One of my persistent themes in this column has been that success as a Web database developer often comes from accruing diverse skills and adapting to changing developer technologies. To build powerful applications a few years ago, many developers used a combination of SQL and PowerBuilder, Delphi, or Visual Basic. Those products are still heavily used, but the Web computing model has fostered the growth of new technologies such as Java and XML. To build Web database applications for the new millennium, many developers are looking to XML, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), and a new generation of Java-enabled and XML-enabled databases. Become an expert in these technologies and you might experience a dose of celebrity. If you're female, you might be the rare database geek who makes it onto the Webgrrls "Most Influential Women" list. If you're male, you'll have to settle for a lesser reward, such as hearing Shockwave and Perl gurus whisper, "He's pretty fly (for a database guy)."
It's possible, of course, to develop applications using Java, EJB, and XML by hand-coding logic and compiling with the JDK. To make life easier, you can also use an integrated development environment (IDE) tailored to developers using Java, databases, XML, components, EJB, and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) objects. Software vendors recognize that developers often want more rapid development techniques, so they're marketing tool suites for developing database applications powered by components, Java, and XML.<>
