Building Java Enterprise Applications

What You’ll Need

Before getting into the thick of things, let’s take a moment to cover what you’ll need to work through this book. Most crucial are the APIs involved, but also important are the application server, the tools I’ll refer to, and all the support facilities for writing enterprise applications. You’ll also probably have your own set of tools (code editors, HTML editors, etc.), and you should not have too much trouble adapting to any of the instructions for specific products that you use.

APIs

First and foremost, this book is focused on the 1.3 version of the J2EE specification. You can download the J2EE specification from Sun online at http://java.sun.com/j2ee. I also highly recommend that you download the J2EE SDK (essentially the reference implementation), which can be used for running the example code.

Let me say a word about application servers. There are as many application server vendors as there are colors, and picking one isn’t always a trivial task. Additionally, trying to cover the nuances of each application server in a single book is simply impossible; you’ll always find a vendor or version that doesn’t fit the instructions, and in those cases a book’s instructions can cause confusion instead of resolving it. To keep this to a minimum, I’ve taken two steps. First, the content in the chapters of this book is focused on APIs, code, and deployment descriptors, and will work on any J2EE 1.3 application server. In other words, the chapters are all vendor-neutral. ...