772 - Chapter 8. Java <blockquote> <p><script> function OpenWin(url, w, h) { if(!w) w = 400; if(!h) h = 300; window. open (url, "_new", "width=" + w + ",height=" + h + ",menubar=no,toobar=no,scrollbars=yes", true); } function Print() { window.focus(); if(window.print) { window.print(); window.setTimeout('window.close();',5000); } } </script><span></span></p> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr valign="top"></tr></table> <table width="100%" height="20" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tr></tr></table> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr valign="top"> <td align="center"><table width="95%"><tr><td align="left"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"> <tr><td valign="top" height="5"><img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/pixel.gif" width="1" height="5" alt="" border="0"></td></tr> <tr> <td><b><font size="1" color ="#0000FF">Team-Fly<img border="0" src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/Fly-Logo.gif" width="81" height="25"></font></b></td> <td valign="top" align="right"> </td> </tr> </table> <hr size="1"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5"> <tr> <td valign="top" width="76" rowspan="4"><img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/0130409510/0130409510_xs.jpg" width="76" height="95" border="0"></td> <td valign="top">Internet-Enabled Business Intelligence<br>By William A. Giovinazzo<br> </td> </tr> <tr><td>Table of Contents</td></tr> <tr><td></td></tr> <tr><td valign="bottom">Part 3. The Software of the Internet</td></tr> </table> <hr size ="1"> <br><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding ="0"><tr><td valign="top"> <h2>Chapter 8. Java</h2> <blockquote> <p><span>All hail, great master, grave Sir, Hail! I come To answer thy best pleasure ; be't to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl'd clouds. To thy strong bidding, Task Ariel, and all his quality.</span></p> <p><span>William Shakespeare</span><br><span>The Tempest</span></p> </blockquote> <p>No book on Internet Enabled Business Intelligence is complete without a discussion of Java. This chapter opens with a quote from the Tempest. Ariel, <span>an airy spirit,</span> is willing to span the globe at Prospero's command. The spirit is willing to dive into fire, to ride upon clouds, to be put to the test in order to fulfill Prospero's request. In the same way Java is able to reach across the globe, to virtually any system on the Internet.</p> <p>Java was first introduced by Sun Microsystems in May 1996. It is owned by Sun, which is actually a very good thing for achieving Java's objectives. We all know that an elephant is a mouse designed by a committee. If Java were in the control of some committee or industrial group , it would quickly lose its relevance. It would be buried under an avalanche of competing interests. While Sun has in place the appropriate mechanisms to grow Java to meet the evolving needs of industry, Sun has been successful in keeping Java on track, focusing on fulfilling the needs of Internet application developers.</p> <p>I am a strong supporter of Java and where Sun is taking the environment. The basis for this enthusiasm is what Java does for the IEBI system developer. Java is described as "a simple, object-oriented, network-savvy, robust, secure, architecture-neutral, portable, high-performance, multithreaded, interpreted, dynamic language."<sup>[1]</sup> Java achieves this objective and provides us with the tools necessary to achieve our goals.</p> <blockquote><p><sup>[1]</sup> http://java.sun.com/java2/whatis/</p></blockquote> <p>As discussed, the Internet has greatly expanded the scope of BI. No longer do the four walls that bind our organization define the scope of our system. IEBI extends back to our suppliers. It reaches forward through our distributors to the end user , to the ultimate consumer. Suppliers, distributors , and end users all benefit from IEBI; all are direct users of IEBI. Two- tier client/server architectures, while they may have had their moment in the sun, are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of an Internet-enabled environment. We have moved on to a new stage in the evolution of information systems, an Internet-enabled stage.</p> <p>If this is true of the underlying hardware architecture, it is all the more so for the software applications that execute on that architecture. Languages and environments that were designed initially for client/server, or worse yet, for mainframe environments, are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of the Internet age. This is the importance of Java. Although a major part of Java is the language itself, it is more than just a language. It is also an environment, a platform upon which we develop Internet-enabled applications. The design of both the Java language and the Java environment map directly onto the Internet architecture we described in Chapter 5. We now have both the language and the environment that enables us to develop true Internet-enabled applications. This is critical to the IEBI systems designer. Java provides both the language and the environment to develop an IEBI system that stretches across the entire value chain.</p> <p>In this chapter, we begin by discussing the basic concepts of object-oriented programming. This is the basis of Java as well as of many of the concepts we will explore in this chapter. Much has been written about object-oriented programming. In this chapter, we explore these concepts from unique perspectivea perspective that I hope will prod all of us into thinking a bit differently about object orientation.</p> <p>We move from our discussion on object orientation to exploring the Java language itself. What are its design objectives? How do those objectives affect IEBI? We examine the Java platform and how it can support IEBI applications, then explore some of the proposed standards for how Java can be applied to IEBI. Specifically, we look at the Java Data Mining (JDM) API and the Java OLAP API. We conclude this chapter with an example of how Oracle uses JavaBeans to simplify the development of IEBI systems.</p> <img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1" border="0"> </td></tr></table> <hr size="1"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"> <tr><td valign="top" height="5"><img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/pixel.gif" width="1" height="5" alt="" border="0"></td></tr> <tr> <td><b><font size="1" color="#0000FF">Team-Fly<img border="0" src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/Fly-Logo.gif" width="81" height="25"></font></b></td> <td valign="top" align="right"> </td> </tr> </table> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr><td valign="top" align="right">Top</td></tr></table> </td></tr></table></td> <td align="center"> </td> </tr> <tr><td colspan="3" align="center" valign="bottom"> <br><table width="100%"><tr><td height="25" valign="middle" colspan="4" align="center"> </td></tr></table> </td></tr> </table> </blockquote>
