J2EE Hosting

With the advent of Web2.0, the Internet is no longer a collection of different static HTML pages which link to one another and provide some data, but it has not evolved into a web of intelligent smart looking pages which respond and react dynamically to the inputs provided by the user.

There are various client side scripting languages like Javascript, VB Script and AJAX and the server side scripting technologies like PHP, Perl, ASP.NET and Java-based solutions among many others. However, while technologies like ASP.NET cannot work on Linux web-servers and the other scripting languages may need some sort of porting to be done, among the various server and client side scripting language options available, the solution which can be used equally well on both Windows and Linux servers is the Java’s set of solutions from Sun Microsystems.

J2EE or Java 2 Enterprise Edition is the combination of the Java Standard Edition along with the APIs and features which form a collection of 12 interrelated technologies. Of these, there is a group of technologies which support the Website Development. The following 5 technologies which, when amalgamated with Java Standard Edition form the J2EE Web.

1. Java Mail - Java's support for mailing protocols like POP3 and IMAP.
2. JSP (Java Server Pages) - This is the Java equivalent of the MS ASP.
3. Servlet API - The Servlet APIs help the developers to develop their code without requiring an external Graphical User Interface and hence improves their productivity.
4. JDBC - Java Database Connectivity for interacting with and managing the Database solution.
5. Enterprise Java Beans - This server-based technology helps to provide support for Extensible Markup Language (XML).

This set of technologies can be used to provide a Java-based website solution by using J2EE hosting. The J2EE Web-toolkit comes with a huge set of Application Program Interfaces (API) and implementations of protocols from working with databases to managing emails. Moreover, inherently Java also brings with it the benefits like reliability, portability and scalability.

The J2EE also supports a lot of XML-based open standards like Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Descriptor Language (WSDL). However, the key of J2EE is that it also provides support for XML-based protocols like XML Remote Procedure Calls (JAX-RPC). This protocol can be used to have a remote procedure call using an XML-based protocol like SOAP and use the enveloping structure and encoding rules of the SOAP protocol to take care of the RPC calls, when trying to send the messages over HTTP. All in all, these features ensure that the web developer may not need to understand the intricacies of XML when he is working on his development work.

Key features and services of Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition are:

1. At the client stage, J2EE supports pure HTML. It also supports Java applets or applications. In order to create HTML code or other formatted data for the client, it makes use of Java Server pages and servlet code. A servlet is a server run small program.
2. The Java servlet Application program interface increases consistency for developers without the need for a graphical user interface.
3. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) provide another layer where the platform's logic is stored. The author can check these services whenever required since there is transparency. An Enterprise Java Beans server performs various functions such as concurrency, security, memory management as well as threading.
4. Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), which is the Java equivalent to ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), is the most commonly used interface for Java databases.

With more and more complex web services needing to be developed over the web’s further evolution, the advent of features and benefits that J2EE can bring in for the website owner are immense. This is because over time, it is visible that J2EE remains up-to-date will all the latest technology breakthroughs in the world of internet.

However, J2EE comes with the pitfall that for JSP pages to work, the user’s browsers should have the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed. For some of the newer technologies of J2EE, the corresponding newer version of JVM toolkit needs to be present for the website to emulate properly and this may turn off some of the people who visit the website.

However, considering the fact that most web designers would have been normal programmers earlier, and a lot of them would have had prior experience in Java, it would make business sense to take a web hosting option that supports J2EE hosting so as to leverage the existing knowhow of Java and convert it easily into making the website. In case, a Java-based hosting is needed one should looks at web hosting services designed specifically for JSPs, since Java server pages (JSPs) work best with these.

Using the J2EE solution provides the benefits of hosting the website with a platform, with which the developers are most comfortable with; and a language which provides the maximum available options for enhancing the look and feel of the websites without compromising on performance and reliability.