CLIENT/SERVER COMPUTING IN THE JAVA[TM] 2 ENTERPRISE EDITION ARCHITECTURE.

CLIENT/SERVER COMPUTING IN THE JAVA[TM] 2 ENTERPRISE EDITION ARCHITECTURE. Chunmin Yang, Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294. ([e-mail]).

Due to the requirement for writing distributed transactional applications, the traditional two-tier models are shifting to multi-tier models, which dramatically simplifies developing, deploying and maintaining applications. Java[TM] 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is the architecture making it easier to write such applications by separating the low-level details from the business logic. J2EE takes the advantage of J2SE (Java[TM] 2 Standard Edition) platform, and extends its portability, database access with Enterprise JavaBeans[TM] components, Java[TM] Servlets API, JavaServer Pages and XML technology. J2EE has a standard programming model, J2EE Application Programming Model for developing multi-tier, thin-client applications on the platform. JDBC[TM] is the core technology used in J2EE for providing programmers with a uniform interface to a wide range of relational databases, and providing a common base on which higher-level tools and interfaces can be built. JDBC[TM] technology is an API, which lets you access virtually any tabular data source from the Java[TM] programming language. It provides cross-DBMS connectivity to a wide range of SQL databases, and now with the new JDBC[TM] API, it also provides access to other tabular data sources. By JDBC[TM] API, the developers could easily connect all corporate data even in a heterogeneous environment. To implement multi-tier systems, the Enterprise beans running on a J2EE server is another key technology, which functions as a middle-tier server in a three-tier client/server system.