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The Internet and World Wide Web represent a foundation on which enterprises are working to build an information economy. In this economy, information takes on as much value as goods and services, and becomes a vital part of the market. The information economy challenges today's enterprises to radically re-think the way they do business.
Predictions about the future of this economy range from glowing scenarios of dynamic new business, industrial, and financial environments capable of unlimited expansion, to gloom and doom prophecies of overinflated expectations and unsustainable hypergrowth. Whatever the predictions, the reality is that enterprises have always tried to gain a competitive advantage by any reasonable means at their disposal, including the latest technologies. This is a natural survival instinct: all viable enterprises, including for-profit, non-profit, and government institutions, continuously look for ways to keep pace by adopting such changes. Complacent organizations routinely fall by the wayside, while the innovators work to transform new challenges into business success.
In the information economy, information assets take on far-reaching strategic value to an organization. The ability to capitalize on this value is key to success. Organizations that succeed will do so by increasing their productivity in moving information into the marketplace.
While these may appear to be new challenges, in many ways the Internet and World Wide Web only intensify a challenge that has long faced information technology professionals: the demand for responsive management of information assets. The initial response to this demand was to ensure that all critical business functions were effectively managed by computerized systems. More recently, the response has been to strive for greater integration among these systems, and increased ability to correlate data from disparate sources into information that serves specific strategic needs. Corporate mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships have provided additional incentive for organizations to integrate such information.
Distributed custom applications are the packages in which an organization delivers information as a commodity. Custom applications add value to and extract value from the information assets of an organization. They allow IT organizations to target specific functionality to specific user needs. By making information available within an organization, they add strategic value to the management and planning processes. By selectively projecting information assets outside the organization, they enable exchanges that are mutually valuable to customers, suppliers, and the organization itself.
In the competitive environment of the information economy, response time is key to the value of custom applications to the enterprise. Organizations need to quickly develop and deploy custom applications, and to easily refine and enhance them to improve their value. They need ways to simply and efficiently integrate these applications with existing enterprise information systems, and to scale them effortlessly to meet changing demands. All these factors affect an organization's ability to respond quickly to changes in the competitive environment.
The goal of the JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM platform) is to define a standard of functionality that helps meet these challenges and thus increases the competitiveness of enterprises in the information economy. The J2EE platform supports distributed applications that take advantage of a wide range of new and evolving technologies, while simplifying development through a component-based application model. The J2EE model supports applications ranging from traditional client-server applications delivered over corporate intranets to e-commerce Web sites on the Internet.
In presenting the J2EE BluePrints programming model, this book hopes to provide enterprise application developers with a strategic perspective on the challenges of the information economy, and a methodical exploration of ways the J2EE platform supports custom applications to meet a reasonably broad range of application requirements. The underlying theme of this discussion is that the J2EE platform provides a single, unified standard that enhances the opportunity for enterprises to project their business information systems beyond their historical borders, while avoiding risks inherent in the task.
This book approaches the J2EE BluePrints programming model by taking a logical view of enterprise platforms and suggesting ways to partition application functionality to use the technologies provided by the J2EE platform most effectively. The intent is to divide the problem of architecting and developing multitier applications with J2EE into manageable portions, then apply appropriate technologies to the portions, leading to more maintainable and scalable solutions. In the process, certain simplifying assumptions are made, not to trivialize certain factors, but to focus on the essential J2EE theme. Note that none of the statements in this book should be interpreted as mandates or requirements, but rather as advice, suggestions, and simple recommendations.
In this chapter: