Chapter 10. Introduction to J2EE and Persistence

Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) represents Sun's vision of a unified platform for building distributed enterprise applications. As such, it contains a broad range of technologies, including support for transactions, security, messaging, authentication, and resource pooling. Most applications will require just a few of these technologies. However, one technology that most applications will require is J2EE's support for persistence the ability to store and retrieve information. The fundamental Java technology for database access, as we have seen, is JDBC. We know that JDBC can be used directly, but it also plays an important part in other technologies, such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB).

The primary goal of this chapter is to understand the place of JDBC and Java database development as part of the J2EE platform and to develop an overview of the roles that databases can play in a distributed application. We will examine general design issues and several common solutions. In working with the examples, we'll also learn to use Oracle's J2EE server, Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J), and Oracle's integrated development environment, JDeveloper.