Java Magazine - July/August 2012

Oracle and Java: A Good Marriage

Priceline.com has
been committed
to both Oracle
and Java tech-
nologies since the
That’s why Michael Diliberto, the company’s CIO,
North America, sees Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and
its Java technologies as a good deal for both Java
users and the future of the platform.

“From the beginning, Oracle was committed to
the internet as a business platform,” says Diliberto.
“[Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison saw the power of the
internet and knew it was going to be a major piece
of the economy going forward, and he wanted to
prepare for it. And from a database standpoint, there
was always a solid commitment to creating the big-
gest, best-performing, and most scalable database
there could be.”
“We’ve always been big fans of Java as a technol-
ogy but had always been a little bit concerned about
its survival,” Diliberto continues. “With Oracle having
a solid track record of turning products into profit,
we’ve been encouraged that Oracle’s leadership sees
a future in Java and is willing to invest in it and drive
it forward, to keep it alive and to keep it growing. The
company has proven that over the last two years.
We’re very happy with the continued investment
that Oracle has been making in the Java platform.”

behind the scenes the priceline.com smart search concurrently fetches data from various suppliers in real time, sorts and filters the combined data, and presents the best options to the customer.

“It’s very important
that the inventory
we are presenting is
fresh,” Poddar adds,
“because there’s a lot
of competition in the
online travel space,
and if a customer finds
that our inventories
are stale, they’ll go to
another travel site and
book there.”
Not all suppliers
have the same inter-
face, Poddar explains,
but Java supports a
vast array of data for-
mats, transformation
tools, and communica-
tion protocols.

“With Java we can
easily receive data
from suppliers either
in SOAP wrapped XML
using HTTPS or in structured data records
over JMS,” he says. “We can then transform
that data using JAXB or other Java APIs into
Java beans. Then we compare those beans
to hundreds of other responses and create
a single response formatted in one of sev-
eral presentation mechanisms.
We could send the response
as a JSON object consumed by
Priceline’s app on a customer’s
iPad, or ship it in XML format to
one of Priceline’s affiliates.”
For this reason, adds Poddar,
“Java turns out to be the perfect
technology for a flexible inven-
tory switch.”

VENDOR INDEPENDENCE

Vendor independence was a key criterion when selecting technology as well, and that’s where competing technologies fell short. “Instead of building a specific product, Java defines a specification and lets multiple vendors in the industry provide an implementation. This gives choice to customers,” says Poddar.

From the start, priceline.com’s back-end
database has been an Oracle database.
But back in 2000, Oracle didn’t have what
priceline.com considered a viable Java driver
for that database. “We started using driv-
ers from one company,” says Poddar. “The
performance was OK, but we didn’t really
like it, so we moved to a second company.
Eventually Oracle came out with their own
drivers and we moved to them.”
“We were able to successfully replace one
implementation of the driver with another
without modifying a single line of code,”
Poddar says. “And that was possible because
of Java’s philosophy that you define a specifi-
cation and let the vendors do the implemen-
tation. This puts the customer in full control
and gives them the ability to find the right
itinerary for them.”
Over the years, as priceline
.com’s needs have changed, Java
has also enabled the company
to migrate its IT infrastructure
across three different hardware
architectures and three dif-
ferent operating systems with
little effort, Poddar adds. The
company launched in 1998 run-
ning on a Digital Equipment
Corporation AlphaServer with
Windows NT, then migrated to
SPARC–based servers running
Solaris (now Oracle Solaris), and
today operates on an array of HP
Intel–based blade servers run-
ning 64-bit Red Hat Linux.