Building Java Enterprise Applications

Architecture

Now that you have a good idea of how the volumes in this series progress, I want to focus on what will be covered in this book. This description follows the flow of the book itself, and lets you know where to turn if you’re looking for something specific. I’ll also give you a little more detail here than what is in the the preface.

Databases

After walking through some design issues, the first technical topic in this book is that of databases. Although almost every Java developer working on enterprise applications has used a database, very few are competent database developers. In other words, programmers know how to create rows and columns, but have very little understanding of the best way to tune tables, of how to perform database normalization, or of making a database work in an efficient, useful way.

In the chapters on database design and setup, I’ll show how to create a database structure via the Structured Query Language (SQL). More importantly, I’ll focus on how to set up a good relational structure and examine how EJBs need to access the data. This discussion should allow you to move from using a database to mastering one, at least in the context of enterprise applications. Discussions will be applicable to any database vendor.

Directory Servers

While traditional relational databases are still the prevalent force for data storage in enterprise applications, alternative data mediums are becoming popular. XML-based databases and object-oriented databases are in ...