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Web Applications Using Java

Literature Review

Web Technologies, especially the Internet, have become a crucial part of the business world in the past few decades (Girdley, Emerson, & Woollen, 2001). Open Source and Java are increasingly becoming popular, and thus, the software engineers have embraced the concept of a no-cost development platform while developing the Web applications. Also, some web application technologies are available including Tomcat, Dot Net platform, and Visual Basic among others thereby allowing the web developers to have a wide range of technologies to choose from. Essentially, Java is the dominant programming language that is used for Web programming today and is widely used by the web development community.  The Java technology, even though it is not an Open Source product, is becoming increasingly attractive to the programmers for Web application development because of its complete class library as well as easy to use syntax, and the programmers can also access it free of charge. 

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The Java technology has given the developers the power to develop distributed, transactions, as well as portable applications that use speed, reliability, and security of the server-side technology.  The enterprise web applications provide these enterprises with business logic. In the world of information technology, these applications should be designed, built, and deployed for less money and resources, but with greater speed (Paulson, 2005).  That is where the use of the Java platform comes in. With Java, the development of Java web applications has never been faster and easier. The Java also offers the developers with powerful application programming interfaces (APIs) while shortening the development time, improving the performance of the application, and reducing the application complexity (Shan & Hua, 2006).  The Java Community helps to ensure that the applications developed with Java meet the required technology standards as well as cross-platform compatibility.

The Java technology also a programming model that is more simplified as compared to its technology rivals. It makes the XML descriptors optional. Rather, the developers can simply enter their information as an annotation directly into the Java source file and let the Java server to configure the necessary components during the deployment and runtime (Reed, 2001).   Those annotations are used to embed data into the program that will be furnished to the deployment descriptor. With these annotations, the program just needs to put the specification information in their code next to the elements of the program that are affected. Also, in the Java EE platform, the developer can benefit from dependency injection to all the resources needed by a component thereby effectively concealing the creation and the lookup resources from the application code (Reed, 2001). The dependency injection enables the Java containers to insert the references to other components using annotations automatically. 

The Java EE Application Model

Java’s EE application model starts with the Java programming language as well as the Java virtual machine. The security, developer productivity, and security provided by these technologies form the foundation of the application model.  The Java EE supports the applications that use the enterprise services for the clients, staffs, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders who make a great contribution to the enterprise (Jazayeri, 2007). These applications are often complex, and they access data from various sources and distribute applications to various clients.  Java’s EE application model is an architecture that implements the services as multitier applications with the potential of offering scalability, manageability, and accessibility that is required by the enterprise-level applications. The model partitions the work required to implement the multitier service into two parts: the business and presentation logic that is implemented by the developer; and the standard system services that are provided by the platform.

The Java EE platform utilizes a distributed multitiered app model for the enterprise applications.  The application logic is subdivided into various components based on functionality, and the applications of which the Java EE application is made up of are installed on different machines according to the tier in the Java EE environment that the application component is part of (Shan & Hua, 2006).  The figure 1 below demonstrates the multitiered Java EE applications that are divided into different tiers. The first tier if the client-tier components that run on the client computer, the second tier consist of the components that run on the Java EE server, the third tier comprises of the components running on the Java EE server, while the last tier is the enterprise information system tier software running on the EIS server.  This is as presented in the following diagram.

The client connects with the business tier that runs on the Java EE server directly or by going through the web pages running on the web tier.  The Java EE web components can be servlets or web pages that are created with JavaServer Faces technology or the JSP technology.  The JSP are text-based documents executing as servlets but allow for a more natural technique for creating static content. The JavaServer Faces technology, on the other hand, builds on the JSP technology and servlets and offers the application user an interface component framework for the applications (Jazayeri, 2007).  The business code that solves or meets the requirements of a specific business domain like banking, finance, or retail, is handled by the enterprise beans that runs in the business tier or the web tier. As per the below diagram, an enterprise bean receives data from the customer programs, processes it and then transfers it to the EIS tier for storage. It also retrieves the data from the storage location, processes it and then sends it back to the customer program.

Some newer technologies like Struts, JavaServer Faces, JSP tag libraries and Ajax were developed with the aim of extending the JSP as well as the Servlets framework and thus improve the various Java EE web development aspects (Girdley, Emerson, & Woollen, 2001). For instance, the JavaServer Faces facilitates the creation of reusable user interface components that can be integrated into the JSP pages. They have made the experience of the Java web application developers to be improved. They allow these developers to create dynamic web pages that leverage XTML forms to get the end-user input as they also provide similar pages to respond to the input. The examples of such use include online shopping carts, personalized content and financial services. Through the Java technology, one can also create collaborative systems like online conferencing. With the Java platform, you also have access to various APIs and features through the use of servlets that run in the WebLogic Server (Shan & Hua, 2006).

References

Girdley, M., Emerson, S. L., & Woollen, R. (2001). J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Servers. Prentice Hall PTR.

Jazayeri, M. (2007, May). Some trends in web application development. In 2007 Future of Software Engineering (pp. 199-213). IEEE Computer Society.

Paulson, L. D. (2005). Building rich web applications with Ajax. Computer, 38(10), 14-17.

Reed, P. R. (2001). Developing Applications with JAVA and UML. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.

Shan, T. C., & Hua, W. W. (2006, October). Taxonomy of java web application frameworks. In E-Business Engineering, 2006. ICEBE’06. IEEE International Conference on (pp. 378-385). IEEE.


Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in Write My Essay Today services. If you need a similar paper you can place your order from pay for research paper services.

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