Database Programming with JDBC & Java, Second Edition

Chapter 6. Other Enterprise APIs

If Life is a Tree, it could all have arisen from an inexorable, automatic rebuilding process in which designs would accumulate over time.

—Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

I have already mentioned one of the Java mantras: “write once, compile once, run anywhere.” You may have heard another very important one: “the network is the computer.” The Web is based on the principle that information resources may be found all over the Internet. Your browser enables you to access all of this information as if it were on your desktop. “The network is the computer,” however, refers to more than the ability to access information resources anywhere in the world. It means being able to access and utilize applications and computing resources anywhere in the world. It means forgetting about the barriers that separate machines and treating them as one huge computer.

JDBC is a key element in this equation, but it is far from the only element. Sun has defined an entire Java standard around those elements, the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Before you dive into the details of applying JDBC to real-world applications, you need to take a brief look at the other players in the world of enterprise systems—the J2EE APIs. I cannot possibly do full justice to these other players in a single chapter—each is worthy of a book of its own. I will nevertheless attempt to provide enough of an overview so that you have a clear picture of how they work with JDBC in real ...