Chapter 12: Presentation Tier Interoperability

Overview

In this first chapter of Part IV, "Advanced Interoperability," we'll cover a topic known as presentation-tier interoperability. To do so, we'll take the first scenario presented in Chapter 2, "Business Requirements for Interoperability," and explain the problem and a potential solution.

Note

In this chapter, the presentation is based on Microsoft ASP.NET for a Microsoft .NET application, and it's based on JavaServer Pages (JSP) for a Java application. In some cases, a presentation tier can also be thought of as an interface that runs on the client (for example, a smart client, Win32 application, or SWING/AWT-based application). For the purpose of this chapter, references to the presentation tier always mean the former, Web-based definition. For more information on both ASP.NET and JSP, refer to the "Creating Applications for the Web" section in Chapter 1, "Microsoft .NET and J2EE Fundamentals."

Some of the samples in this chapter refer to topics we've already covered in the book. This includes the serialization techniques discussed in Chapter 3, "Exchanging Data Between .NET and Java," and some of the shared database techniques presented in Chapter 7, "Creating a Shared Database." Although it's not necessary to read through these chapters, you might want to familiarize yourself with the relevant topics when running the sample code in this chapter.