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You've read everything you can find about middleware, CORBA, transaction
monitors, message brokers, enterprise JavaBeans, and other distributed
technologies. Now it's time to put them to work. Time to build
your company's first multi-tiered application. But where do you start?
How do you structure the programs? How do you distribute the code?
What about integrating existing applications and databases? This was
the problem that I faced as I began working with multi-tiered development.
There was plenty of information on the tools and technologies,
but little on how to make them work in a business setting.
Application servers and related technologies offer great promise and
potential for solving the issues that trouble corporate computing.
Problems like scalability, application integration and code reuse. But
before we can solve these grand problems, we have to figure out how to
use the technology. How do we process orders, ship products, bill customers,
approve loan applications and pay insurance claims.
My hope is that this book will offer some guidelines to start you on
your way. Instead of focusing on middleware, the emphasis is on the
design issues and programming techniques necessary to create an overall
business application framework. The approach is user-centric, relying
on joint development between developers and business people, using
short, iterative design-program-review cycles. Object-oriented development
is also stressed using designs illustrated with UML and programming
examples written for the Java platform. Although Java and RMI are
used, the framework will work with almost any language or distributed
object platform. |