Simpler J2EE

J2EE is unnecessarily complicated. The goal of this website is to help you do more with less. Using just the technologies and frameworks that you learn from this website from scratch - you can build high quality, high powered J2EE applications of arbitrary complexity. If you need some help with this - write to me at the email address given below.

Two questions you worry about are: what database? what web plus application server? These are answered below (PostgreSQL and Tomcat respectively). Likewise you ask what data access framework? what user interaction framework? These are answered below too (iBATIS and Struts respectively). Also, the base technologies needed for J2EE are covered - JSP and Servlets. We suggest free excellent choices out of the whole range of what is available.

The point of this website is not simply that you can use these technologies and frameworks - but that you can use just these to the exclusion of everything else to create a great deal more than what you thought possible - professionally.

Click on any of the links below to get started.

These items are of interest for J2EE, Java EE or Server Side Java programming (all are the same).

PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a relational database management system - a "powerful" "industrial strength" one at that and a long lived piece of open source software like Linux so you can trust it.
JSP
JSP - Java Sever Pages - lets you make your HTML subject to the rules of the program running on your Server machine.
You think that you are writing pure HTML - but you are also putting Java programming into the HTML. That's JSP
iBATIS
iBATIS helps your application pull data out of a relational database and to push data into it for you. I find it the simplest and most useful of the data access frameworks.
HTML
You know HTML - everything on this page is created in HTML using an HTML "What You See is What You Get" editor. It's just that HTML is more complicated than one thinks. If you are a web software engineer, you will need to use this.


Tomcat
Tomcat is an "application server". It runs the Java code that you write within itself in response to user requests. You will need to get Tomcat (or your favourite Java application server) before you can run any of the frameworks below.
Servlets
Servlets give you everything JSP has to offer and more. They are designed to accept requests and send back HTTP responses to the client machine at the user's end in a broad way.
Struts
Struts is a "front-end" framework - it helps on the Server to build the "user interaction and navigation" unit for your users.
JavaScript
JavaScript like HTML is more complicated than one thinks. It is a full fledged client side programming tool that runs in your web browser. This is worth being familiar with for you. It is increasingly in use.
A Concrete Example
Download the JPetStore 5 example from the site http://ibatis.apache.org/javadownloads.cgi
It is an excellent example to study, emulate, and modify as an example of the topics discussed on this web page. If you put the jpetstore.war file in your tomcat\webapps directory and point your browser to
http://localhost:8080/jpetstore - then you can play with the running web application right away.




Licensing
PostgreSQL is released under the BSD License.
Java, J2EE, JSP, Servlets and JavaScript are trademarks of Sun Microsystems.
 and part of the Java group of products released by Sun except JavaScript.
JavaScript was released by the Mozilla foundation and is registered to Sun.
iBATIS, Struts, and Tomcat are released under the Apache Software License.

Thanks to all the intrepid explorers who have created an open software space for the rest of us.

Please write back with any feedback to the following email address:
sandpjain at gmail.com
Sandeep Jain