Martin Gainty wrote:
> There are about 12 different ways of accomplishing this featureset in J2EE
> TC would be the lightest implementation
For the unitiated: Tomcat (from the Apache Software Foundation)
> GF or WL would be the more heavyweight J2EE AppServer offerings
For the uninitiated: GlassFish (from Sun) and WebLogic (from BEA/Oracle)
J2EE development isn't the shrieking nightmare it used to be with
Enterprise Java Beans, since JPA 1.0 and implementations of it like
Hibernate Annotations make things a _great_ deal less painful.
You still need to "get" Java in a pretty solid way, and be willing to
rethink the way you handle database access a bit. You're doing your
database access via an object-model translation layer in an application
server, accessing and manipulating persistent objects that back onto the
real database. You have to define the persistence scheme by which these
objects are stored and retrieved using tools like Hibernate or JPA 1.0
(Hibernate Annotations, Toplink, etc). You have to understand Java
object persistence and migration, vaguely how the app servers work, how
to work with JSP, etc.
Many of the same tools are useful in a J2SE environment for rich client
development using Swing, but that's a *lot* of work for a volunteer project.
--
Craig Ringer