[geeks] You Are in a Maze of Twisty Tunnels...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

...All different?  Or all the same?  That's what I'm trying to figure
out.

I'm taking a short trip to California for just over a week, and the
flight out there and back (and the time I'll spend alone while the SO is
catching up with friends) will be an excellent time for me to learn this
"Enterprise Java" stuff.

Basically, I'm tired of dealing with PHP's ugly syntax, recurring
security holes, and braindead scoping rules.  I know CGI quite well, but
one project that I'm working on (the front-end to the IRIX ports
database) could benefit from the code-sharing that Java makes so easy,
and things like persistent database connections would require me to
write a persistent connection pool manager and lots of other middleware
that already exists as a part of PHP and the J2EE platform.

In order to get my feet wet, I want to write a simple library manager,
since my fiancee and I have a -lot- of books between us, and we keep
loaning them out and forgetting who has what.  It's conceptually simple,
requires only a minimum amount of SQL acrobatics, and is well-suited to
having a HTTP frontend, so I thought it'd be an excellent project to
learn how all this crap is supposed to fit together.

But the alphabet soup of J2EE is making my head hurt.  Do I want
servlets or Java Server Pages?  Session beans or Enterprise Java Beans?
And there are so many more.  Sun's J2EE tutorial promises the world, but
assumes that I -want- to control the world, when my problem is such a
simple one.

And then, once I decide roughly on which direction I want to take, there
are so many choices for whatever-the-thing-is that runs the server-side
components.  Between an Application Server, an EJB container, a Servlet
container, and "Connectors", I'm all confused.

At first, I thought I just needed servlets and something in which to run
them, but the documentation points at EJB (which supposedly needs
another piece of software) and all sorts of other stuff.  Does there
exist a newbie-friendly[0] introduction to how all this fits together so
that I can figure out what I need to learn first?


[0] I know quite a bit of Java, but it's all J2SE-stuff.  I've never
    played with any of the server-side technologies.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
  "Albert Einstein nailed space-time, but the wild thing had him stumped.
   Al, baby, two and two make five-and-a-quarter; that's why people fall
   in love." -- Thomas Dolby, "That's Why People Fall in Love"