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

[Dave McGuire]

On Sunday, December 15, 2002, at 05:03 PM, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
...
> 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.
...
> 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?

   I can't answer your specific question, as I've only started playing 
with J2EE stuff recently...but I was faced with a similar job several 
months ago, and I decided on servlets.  They're simple, there are good 
tutorials out there (I can point you to the one that helped me), and 
it's quick and easy to get up to speed.  JSP has really nice 
capabilities, but like any scripting-embedded-in-HTML trick, it's ugly 
as sin and very difficult to read.  The majority of the J2EE stuff 
seems like it's way, way more than you need for a library management 
system.

   I wrote a very simple database front-end servlet that I can send you 
that'll get you started, if you're like me and learn more quickly from 
functional code than from volumes of documentation.

           -Dave

--
Dave McGuire           "I'll send you adapters to go both ways."
St. Petersburg, FL                          -Bill Bradford