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Today we are going to talk a little bit tekkie and programming stuffs, so people who are interested in building websites or who are in the computer field should read this one - Aloha!

One of the skills that a JAVA programmer needs today is how to use the J2EE framework.

J2EE is a method for developing web applications that requires a connection to a database, accessing web services and many others. Some examples of web applications include e-commerce websites like Ebay and Amazon. In fact, any website which requires the user to enter a credit card number is an e-commerce website.

There are two popular platforms that enables us to develop web applications: Dot net from microsoft and j2ee. I personally like j2ee because its free to download and the programming language it uses is JAVA, unlike dotnet which requires programmers to either learn C# or VB.

Using microsoft’s Dotnet/ASP and its programming languages like VB or C# are also great for developing websites. Actually, a recent study from Info-Tech Research Group noted that .NET is about a 2:1 favorite over Java for enterprise development “Info-Tech’s research identified that almost half (49 percent) of all enterprises focus primarily on .NET.

In addition to that, my professor told me that almost all governments around the world use DotNET, including the Canadian government. They believe that paying for a particular software makes them beleive that it is secure, reliable and cheaper to maintain. Whether this is true or not will be the topic of another discussion.

So which is better? There is currently a great debate going on about this. I am not going to discuss about that but if you want to know more, you can read it on http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/pdf/J2EE-vs-DotNET.pdf

So lets come back to our tutorial

The programs to develop j2ee applications are:

Using eclipse

Install JDK at least 1.5 or later from sun which can be downloaded from http://java.sun.com/products/archive/j2se/5.0_06/index.html. JDK is a virtual machine which lets JAVA run on any machine. Tip: install the JDK, not the JRE. JRE is a subset of JDK and JRE is used to run java applications only, not j2ee.

Install Eclipse 3.3 for EE http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. You need Eclipse IDE to write servlet and jsps which i will talk about later. You can also use other IDE’s like JDeveloper 10g from Oracle or NetBeans 6.1.

Finally install an application server. An application server is used to host the web application, and connect to a database. Application servers have their own databases included. Web servers are more ancient and do not include database. We can either use JBoss http://labs.jboss.com/jbossas/downloads/

or Oracle 10g

Next time (when i have time) i will introduce you to servlets and jsps, which form the pillars of developing eBusiness sites.

In the meantime, good luck with the installation