What is the use of an OC4J in an Enterprise Environment?

Oc4J is a lightweight container which is installed as part of Oracle Application Server. The goal of OC4J is to manage J2EE enterprise systems.

Oc4J processes are configured & managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. So this means that you cannot locally manage your OC4J processes using admin.jar or by hand-editing the configuration files.

For those who want to use a standalone OC4J in a development environment, can download oc4j_extended.zip from OTN and manage the OC4J processes using oc4j.jar & admin.jar command-line tool.

In a typical production environment, all OC4J instances are controlled & managed by either Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g or command-line tools typically used for starting, stopping, restarting, configuring & deploying applications in an OC4J. Also, Oracle AS can manage multiple clustered OC4J processes.