API’s such as:
JNDI
The servlet API
The security API
and the suite of API’s collectively known as the Java Enterprise APIs – JDBC, RMI and Java IDL – together make Java a formidable force on the server. The leap from a good server development language to being a powerful enterprise development platform, however, is still far.
Before you get into the heart of Java enterprise’s capabilities, you should first understand what the term “enterprise” means in the context of enterprise software.
THE ENTERPISE:
Buried within the term “enterpise” is the idea of a business taken wholistically. An enterpise solution identifies common problem domains within a business and provides a shared infrastructure for solving those problems. If your business is running a bank, your individual branches may have different business cultures, but those cultures do not alter the fact that they all deal with customers and accounts.
Looking at this business from an enterpise perspective means abstracting away from irrelevant differences in the way the individual branches do things, and instead approaching the business from their common ground.
Java is an object-oriented language with database access and distributed computing at its core.
The Java platform specification has since grown to encompass many other APIs. The following is an abridged list of some of the Java APIs:
Java Enterpise:
Java Enterprise actually consists of three separate libraries that provide access to an organization’s resources and applications. The Java Database Connectivity API or JDBC, provides database connectivity. Using JDBC, an application can perform database access independent of the actual database engine being used for data storage. The same application can be written once, compiled once, and run against any database engine with a JDBC driver.
The Interface Definition Language (IDL) enables Java applications to provide a language-neutral interface between Java objects and objects located across the network. It follows the Object Management Group (OMG) IDL specification.
Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is a java specific API that lets objects call methods in objects located across the network. Unlike IDL, RMI is a Java-only solution. Instead of writing complex communication protocols using sockets, an application can communicate with remote objects through simple Java method calls.
