PATCH ADVISOR TOOL FOR ORACLE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

It is well known that some software bugs always• remain even after thorough, well planned and rigorous testing of application software. Also, new versions of software/applications are released which contain new features and enhanced functionality. Installing the whole thing again is not very sensible and is not always feasible. So, to introduce new features and bug fixes, patches are released, which the user can apply to his installed application system. The patch replaces or adds some of the files and forces compilation and relinking to form the new executables to get the enhanced functionality. The report discusses the enhancement done for searching a relevant patch for Oracle Applications. Also, as customer installation of Oracle Application may differ in several factors, and thus they may not be interested in all the patches released by Oracle. Previously, the customer was completely dependent on Support people for finding a relevant patch. With Oracle recommending the customers to be on latest patch levels to get the best functionality and performance, the tool will provide a framework that will ease the process of finding and downloading a patch according , to customer preferences and installation type. The tool being a browser based is platform independent. The technologies used for implementation are Java and XML. The tools used for implementation are ORACLE ]Developer 3.2, ORACLE CABO, ORACLE XML PARSER, ORACLE JLINT, ORACLE VISUAL XSL and ORACLE VISUAL DTD.