Java Database Best Practices

Chapter 9. J2EE Basics

We must know the secret union of soul and body, and the nature of both these substances; by which the one is able to operate, in so many instances, upon the other.

—David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Most of the time when you are working with a database in a Java environment, you are working in some aspect of the J2EE framework. Rarely will you build a pure JDBC application with no reliance on the J2EE platform. It is therefore no surprise that many of the chapters in this book assume some level of appreciation for the J2EE APIs.

This tutorial is far from a comprehensive how-to on building J2EE applications. If you are looking to learn J2EE, then you should pick up a book dedicated to the subject. In this chapter, I offer an overview of the most important concepts in the J2EE platform so that you can tackle the subject matter of this book’s first eight chapters.

The Platform

A platform provides application developers with a full abstraction of a generic computing environment. The Windows platform, for example, is a suite of APIs that enables developers to write desktop applications for any system running Windows, regardless of the underlying hardware they are using. The main Java platform, Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), does the same thing except its abstraction spans all desktop systems.

Whereas the J2SE platform creates a standard for desktop programming independent of hardware and operating system, the J2EE platform provides a standard ...