On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, marc fleury wrote:
> It's a good question.
>
> If you ask me (you did :) EJB is particularly well suited for "application"
> that run on the web. I.e. not necessarily "web applications" with all HTML
> front end but "distributed applications" with the whole distributed objects
> shebang.
> j2ee includes the servlet/jsp thingy (and all the derivative publishing
> frameworks out there, coocoon, xmlc, bla bla bla) and that means they become
> "web applications".
>
> I agree the terminology can be missleading
How about your ordinary 3-tier or n-tier applications? Do you not see
benefit in putting your "business logic" (fancy word for manipulating
information systems) to the middleware server, and keeping your standalone
clients light and GUI only?
The traditional client-server has its problems when you need to fix that
trivial database update bug that forgot to insert the right value into
that lone column -- you end up updating all the clients. With the logic in
the middle layerand careful design of interfaces you can slip in alot of
new functionality without having to go tell your customers to update their
software - again.
You can achieve the same by coding RMI yourself but my bet is you still
end up rewriting alot of functionality that the application servers can
provide you with. Transactions and security and caches and pools seem nice
even if you're not doing webby stuff :) And since alot of app server
vendors seem to have fallen in love with the J2EE buzzword it's pretty
likely that that's what theyre going to try and sell to you.
Of course, a really cool app server would integrate a technology like the
Java WebStart that lets the server admin update the client which then gets
automagically updated on all your customer machines with nice little
jardiffs...
I do see value in J2EE for standalones. Maybe I'm just weird that way :)
-- Juha
> >
> > Yes, I am WAY behind on reading my mail. ;-P
> >
> > Question: Can someone enlighten me on whether J2EE is useful
> > outside of web applications? It seems that many companies are
> > moving to Java on their webserver (and rightly so, IMHO), but
> > what about the minority of us developing standalone Java
> > applications? JMS, of course, could be useful, but are there any
> > other J2EE technologies that could be applied to standalone
> > apps? Or is J2EE intended to be a framework for developing
> > web apps? (If so, I hate the name...)
> >
> > TIA,
> > Russ
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
