Oracle ups the ante for mobile app servers

Oracle announced on Monday Version 9.0.4 of 9i Application Server. Despite the small incremental change in version numbers, the next version which will ship in the third quarter will deliver major changes in mobile functionality.

Among the three major features included in the next version, perhaps the most significant is the ability for users to access any Web service from a J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) midlet. A midlet is an application written in Sun’s Java environment and targeted at cell phones and handhelds.  

When a user requests a service from the handheld device, the 9i AS acts as a proxy and makes the SOAP request to the Web service provider. An IP, an extension of SOAP on the handheld, will enable the midlet to use that Web service.  

“The app server packetizes the Web service and sends it back to the midlet,” said Jacob Christfort, CTO at Oracle’s mobile products and services division.

A queuing mechanism will also hold a query should the network be unavailable or if the time lag is so great the application times out. “We are basically putting the server-side building blocks [in place] for an enterprise developer to take advantage of J2ME,” Christfort said.

The other two mobile components added to 9i will give developers both the ability mark up applications in xHTML 2.0 and to write applications that leverage MMS [Multimedia Messaging Service], the follow-on to SMS.

A program written with xHTML will be transcoded by the application server on the fly and sent to any device whether it uses WAP, VXML, the Palm, or Pocket PC operating system.

Messages using MMS will be submitted to the application server and the server will send it as a standard MMS message to those phones that have the capability, including reading the message in voice. For handhelds not capable of executing multimedia applications, like a BlackBerry that is only capable of text-based e-mail, the server will convert the message to text.   

Oracle9i AS will be priced at $20,000 per processor plus $10,000 per processor for the mobile additions.