Stored Programs and J2EE Applications

While it is certainly possible to use JDBC inside Java to construct client/server applications or even Java applets, the most significant interaction between Java programs and a relational database often occurs with a J2EE application server environment, usually within the context of a J2EE-based web application. This application server could be a commercial J2EE implementation such as WebLogic or WebSphere or—perhaps more typically in combination with MySQL—an open source J2EE server such as Tomcat or JBoss.

Modern J2EE applications follow one of two major patterns with respect to database interaction:

Servlet pattern

In the servlet pattern, JDBC code is included within Java programs running within the application server. These programs are known as servlets . These servlets are free to communicate directly with the database through embedded JDBC code, although many applications will choose to interact with the database through an object-relational mapping interface such as Hibernate.

EJB pattern

In an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) based application, access to database objects is abstracted via entity EJB beans. Each entity bean represents either a table or a common multitable entity, and each instance of the entity bean typically represents a row in that table or result set. The EJB pattern contains methods to retrieve, update, delete, and insert rows within this logical table.

A full tutorial on J2EE database programming is beyond the scope of ...

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