Overview

One of the challenges that people encounter when being introduced to something new is deciphering exactly what they are learning, and what the constituents of that subject are. Only once they have a good basic comprehension of these questions can they really begin the learning process.

The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is no exception to this rule. There have been many cases where people have strayed away from using this platform for developing business applications, purely on the basis they could not understand it or it was presented as a very complex specification. Therefore it appeared to present a high degree of risk in its adoption for any development effort.

The objective of this chapter is to cut through the complexities of the J2EE specification, presenting it in a very intuitive manner. Subsequent chapters in Part I of this book will methodically build your knowledge of the J2EE platform.