Building Java Enterprise Applications

Decision Point

I don’t want to leave you completely on your own in terms of what to program next. Obviously, you need some sort of user interface on top of the infrastructure put together so far, and of course it needs to fit in with the architecture described up to this point. The two most common application front-end paradigms, as of this writing, are the standard web application (servlets, JSP) and the web services framework (SOAP, UDDI, WSDL). I’ll briefly touch on each. This will also give you some insight as to what the next volumes will cover.

Web Applications

A web application, in the context of this book, is meant to refer to a J2EE-centric application programming model. This means that servlets are used for application logic, and either provide presentation on their own or defer to some other presentation technology. Popular options in this area are JavaServer Pages (JSP), frameworks like Apache Turbine (http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine), and Apache Cocoon (http://xml.apache.org/cocoon). While these are just a few of many examples for handling content and presentation, they all build on the J2EE core APIs (usually servlets), and well-understood Java and XML APIs like SAX, DOM, and JDOM.

If you don’t know what type of front-end you want to provide to the end user, this is almost certainly the best choice. It is the most common, and as a result you can easily find resources on the relevant technologies. Books like Java Servlet Programming and JavaServer Pages (both from ...