Embracing J2EE in Large Scale Software Projects

Introduction

Businesses, particularly IT businesses, are often faced with new and changing technologies. The decision to be made is whether to embrace the new technologies or continue doing business in the old, familiar ways. One of these new technologies is the Java 2 Enterprise Edition Platform (J2EE).

J2EE is a set of specifications and technologies for developing, deploying and managing large, scalable, multi-tier, server-based enterprise applications. Using J2EE significantly reduces the cost, difficulty and speed of developing and maintaining these applications.

J2EE was developed by Sun Microsystems in collaboration with leading enterprise software companies, and has been embraced by many international IT industries. J2EE will play a large, and possibly pivotal, role in the future of any enterprise software development.

The Benefits of Using J2EE

Whether the enterprise application is for in-house use or for vendors and customers to access via the Internet, speed of development and time-to-market is of primary concern. You want to enable your developers to concentrate on the essential business logic that makes up your application, as opposed to spending their time developing the software infrastructure to integrate the diverse resources needed to support the application. Often this infrastructural development can take up to half of the allocated development time. Scalability, security, portability, robustness and reliability are also extremely important concerns.

That is where J2EE comes to the rescue. The J2EE platform wraps all the existing resources and provides a unified, component-based model which can be used to support your enterprise application. It is a standard that sits on top of a wide range of existing enterprise systems (web services, database and transaction management systems, naming and directory services, messaging systems, CORBA services, legacy ERP/CRM application connectors and the like).

The J2EE platform uses the idea of components and containers to simplify development. Components encapsulate the business logic and are written by the developers. The containers provide the separation of business logic from resource management, ie they provide enterprise infrastructure. For example, every J2EE server contains an Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) container which handles distributed communication, transaction management, multi-threading support, etc. Developers write Enterprise JavaBean components to encapsulate the business logic and rules.

In the same way, web-based J2EE applications use a servlet container within an J2EE web server. The servlet container provides the session and component infrastructure needed by the Java servlets and JSP components developed by the programmers.

Portability is ensured by a standard application deployment structure and Java's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" platform portability. With over 30 independent vendors supplying more than 70 standards-compliant J2EE application servers (with free as well as commercial versions), vendor independence and subsequent peace of mind are guaranteed.

Upskilling Your Team

Incus Data can provide you and your team with the Java and J2EE training that you need to make your next (or first) J2EE project a success. We have been training programmers in both procedural and object oriented languages and systems development since 1988. We present a number of Java and related courses, including:

• Java Programming
• Advanced Java Programming
• Java Servlets & JSP Programming
• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) Development
• J2EE Development
• J2EE Technology Overview
• J2ME Development
• Jakarta Struts Workshop

We can also present customised courses to cover the topics you require.

Lewis Coosner: 2005

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