I pride myself in saying exactly what I want on this blog - political correctness be damned. I am, however, sometimes a little bit glib. I misfired in this article by saying it was just a schema - sorry if I misled the tiny number of people who actual read the article and the even tinier number of people that actually cared. My problems were related to a missing schema in the install. Yes, I know that the Single Sign-on option is a lot more than a simple schema - it is (drumroll...) an LDAP server as well. Okay, great, let's move on.

In all fairness, I am very satisfisfied with Oracle Application Server (10g included). The existing OAS offers an enterprise-class integration of the Apache and J2EE container environments. It performs well, is stable and isn't crammed full of stupid features that I don't really want or need (like JBoss). The security wallet SSL interface is slick.

However, I stand by my pointed criticism of the Infrastructure installation (and Portal by proxy). I've followed the development of the tool for a couple of years now, because it has features that would be very useful for our computing environment. In OAS 902, the infrastructure installation was painful and you needed to open a TAR to get specific help on fixing port problems in the scripts, etc. In OAS 9203, it worked fine - no help needed. In OAS 10g (on Windows) it is missing the RepCA tool. You can download it for Linux but no dice if you don't have a free Linux machine to play with.

A couple of things. I shouldn't have to open a TAR to get help on the installation of any tool that is not a beta. I have maybe two or three hours on a Friday afternoon to explore new applications, and I should be able to install those applications. I always have a Windows machine available, but not always a Linux machine. I can install SQL Server and its OLAP tools easily within that two hour block and run some examples to get a good feel for how well it works.

I really don't understand why it is so hard for Oracle to create a simple LDAP (single sign-on server) that works directly from the download. Even further, why they don't just provide me an interface for single-sign on authentication and let me write my own code. I'd probably leverage our existing Windows authentication and write a real single sign-on using SSPI.