What is Oracle Applications/Oracle e-Business Suite

To facilitate big businesses, Oracle Corporation have created collection of software in the category of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) known as modules, that are integrated to talk to each other and known as Oracle Applications or E-Business Suite.

 Oracle Inventory deals with the items you maintain in stock, warehouse etc.

 Oracle Receivables and Oracle Order Management are dealing with customers like orders given by Customers and Money collected from customers.

 Oracle General Ledger receives information from all the different transaction modules and summarizes them in order to create profit and loss statements, reports for paying Taxes etc.

 Oracle Cost Management helps to maintain the costs of items in your inventory and the immediate modules that it interacts with are Oracle Inventory, Oracle Bills of Material, Order Management.

 

Oracle Applications Previous Releases

10.7 : Oldest Release of Oracle ERP which is character, thin client based. Oracle has stopped support for this release from year 1998.
11 :
11i :
R12 : Latest Release by Oracle In the chain of Oracle ERP Releases.

 

Whats new in Oracle Apps R12

    Oracle Applications Release 12 is the latest release in the chain of E-Business Suite Releases by Oracle. This is a step towards Oracle Fusion as this uses Oracle Fusion Middleware applications in its base e.g. Oracle application Server 10g, Oracle BI Discoverer 10g etc.
    This release came up with the new file system model i.e. segregation of Code, Data and Configurations to have easy maintenance and to avert NFS mount issues on shared Application tier configuration systems. Also

Autoconfig will not write anything in APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP area in R12. All instance specific configurations, log files are written in INST_TOP area. Instance Home provides the ability to share Applications and technology stack code among multiple instances.

    The major changes in this release are :

On Middle Tier

• Application Server version 1.0.2.2.2 is changed by 10g Application Server i.e. 10.1.3.X

• mod_jserv is replaced by mod_oc4j
• Apache which is part of Application Server mentioned above is changed from version 1.3.19 to 1.3.34
• Long running Forms & Reports Version 6i (8.0.6) are replaced by Forms & Reports Version 10g i.e. 10.1.2.X
• Java/ JDK version 1.3.X or 1.4.X will be replaced by JDK 1.5.X

On File System

• There are three ORACLE_HOME, one for Web Server another for Forms & Reports and third for Database with the upgraded versions i.e.10g AS for Web Server, 10g AS for forms & reports , 10g R2 for database

• A new top INSTANCE_TOP is introduced in Release 12 for configuration and log files along with the other TOP's in existing in 11i.

    

Oracle Apps R12 Architecture

R12 file system has come up with new model - Code, Data, Configurations are segregated nicely to have easy maintenance, to avert NFS mount issues on shared appl tier configuration systems. Auto-config will not write anything in APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP area in R12. All instance specific configurations, log files are written in INST_TOP area. Instance Home provides the ability to share Applications and technology stack code among multiple instances

In Release 12, the application tier contains Oracle Application Server 10g (OAS10g). Three servers or service groups comprise the basic application tier for Oracle Applications:

• Web services

The Web services component of Oracle Application Server processes requests received over the network from the desktop clients.

• Forms services

Forms services in Oracle Applications Release 12 are provided by the Forms listener servlet or Form Socket mode, which facilitates the use of firewalls, load balancing, proxies, and other networking options.

• Concurrent Processing server

Processes that run on the Concurrent Processing server are called concurrent requests. When you submit such a request, either through HTML-based or Forms-based Applications, a row is inserted into a database table specifying the program to be run. A concurrent manager then reads the applicable requests in the table, and starts the associated concurrent program.

Note: There is no concept of an Administration server in Release 12. By default, patching can be undertaken from any application tier node.