Web Applications and the J2EE Landscape

Developing Web applications is very different from developing conventional applications. Historically, applications ran locally on a single computer and contained all the logic to present, control, and access data for a single application. With the introduction of Java, applications could be developed that ran on any number of platforms, both local and remote. However, having a portable language wasn't enough; what developers really wanted was to be able write applications that were hosted on a server but displayed on a client computer using a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). These applications would rely on the server for data, but the client for presentation, and could run and be displayed on many different platforms. For this kind of development, Java simply wasn't sufficient, so Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) was born. J2EE defines the basic server services required for developing applications.

WebLogic Server first came on the market as a Web server and then added core J2EE support. WebLogic Server has been on the cusp of new technologies and specifications in the J2EE and application server space for years and is the front runner in terms of features and performance. It was the first to fully support the EJB 1.0 and 1.1 specifications and was a full year ahead of the competition with EJB 2.0 support. More recently, Web services came into being, and WebLogic Server 7.0 and WebLogic Workshop 1.0 sprang into being providing a GUI-based Web services development tool. However being able to develop Web services simply wasn't enough and WebLogic Workshop 8.1 arrived with a full suite of tools for developing sophisticated enterprise applications.