Oracle and ColdFusion Demo

In order to demonstrate how Oracle Database Hosting can be used to serve dynamic content to a Web site, we have created an example site. The example site is a fictitious video store called Video Example . This example site requires two major pieces, a Shared Oracle Hosting account to store the data, and a Virtual Server to serve the dynamic Web pages.

ColdFusion
A Solaris Virtual Server account was selected to host the Web server because of support for ColdFusion. ColdFusion is a good platform to develop dynamic web pages because of the native Oracle driver support. The ColdFusion macro contains the HTML formating codes to frame the page and it also makes calls to the Oracle database. Although ColdFusion was used in this example it is possible to use any service that generates either OCI8 or Perl DBI Proxy calls.

View the Video Example site

How Did We Do It?
The steps we took to create the site are listed below.

On the Oracle Database Hosting account we did the following.

We continued the process on the Solaris Virtual Server.

    1. Installed ColdFusion.

    2. Configured the ColdFusion server (http://YOUR-DOMAIN.NAME/CFIDE/administrator/) to point to the Oracle datasource.

    3. Created the ColdFusion Macro to display the data.

    4. Posted the macro to the Web Server.

How does it work?
In the video example the page has static and dynamic elements. The static elements are the header, footer, and section headings. The dynamic elements are the videodata in the three main sections. In the three dynamic sections (top rent, top sales, and new release) the text is generated by making queries to the Oracle database.

Video System Diagram

Below you will see a diagram showing how the Hosted Oracle Database can generically be accessed. It shows the relationship between the Web Clients, Administrative Clients, Web Servers, and the Oracle Database.

Oracle N-Tier Client-Server System Diagram