Chapter 1. Introduction

This book has arguably unreasonable goals. Its title alone invites raised eyebrows. Enterprise application development, on any platform, involves a wide array of tools to solve an equally wide array of issues and to manage several levels of complexity. How can you possibly hope to cover Java enterprise development tools in a single work, let alone in a nutshell?

Our approach to this lofty goal is simple. We have selected the key tools and APIs that enterprise architects and developers have found invaluable when working in the Java environment. Some of these are part of the core Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) environment; many of them are part of the larger Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)^[*] environment; many of them fall outside the Java standards but are useful and popular de facto standards within the Java community. For all of the tools covered, we provide a short but effective tutorial while also striving to cover enough critical detail that the material can serve as a quick reference as well. Along the way, in keeping with the "nutshell" concept of this series, we've had to edit brutally. Only tools and APIs that are proven in the industry while also being critical to success made the cut. Some things, useful and otherwise, had to be left by the wayside. But we hope that sifting effort alone will benefit you, since the book also serves as a guide through the sometimes confusing swirl of competing APIs, tools, and frameworks that make enterprise development daunting at times.

^[*] Sun recently announced a new naming scheme for the various Java platform editions. In the future, the standard edition, J2SE, will be referred to simply as "Java SE," and the enterprise edition, J2EE, will be called "Java EE." We've chosen to stick with the current nomenclature of "J2SE" (or just "Java") for the standard edition and "J2EE" for the enterprise edition. If the new naming scheme takes hold in the community, we're sure our readers are smart enough to make the translation. If you've been working in the Java environment for very long, you've already had a lot of practice in this regard.

We've divided the material in the book into two main sections: tools that are part of the Java and J2EE standards and are managed under the auspices of the Java Community Process and tools that are not part of these standards but have been proven in practice and are de facto standards in the Java development community. Before we summarize the contents of these sections of the book, let's make it clear what we mean by "enterprise computing ."