6.6 Application Programming Model

The J2EE application programming model for enterprise information system access lays down a set of design choices, guidelines, and recommendations for Application Component Providers. These guidelines enable an Application Component Provider to develop an application based on its overall functional and system requirements. The application programming model focuses on the following aspects:

• Accessing enterprise information system resources from components
• Using tools to simplify and reduce application development effort involved in accessing enterprise information systems
• Getting connections to an enterprise information system and managing connections
• Supporting the security requirements of an application
• Supporting the transactional requirements of an application

The following sections describe each of these aspects from the perspective of relational database access using JDBC 2.0 API, with the exception of transactions, which are discussed in Chapter 8. An important point to note is that the following sections are not meant to be a programmer's guide to using the JDBC API.