Industrial Strength N-Tier Application Architecture using J2EE

J2EE Application Development - Enterprise Application Development Services : J2EE - Java 2 Enterprise Edition

- The purpose of this document is to outline the architectural elements of an industrial strength n-tier application developed using J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition). J2EE defines a set of standards for implementing scalable and reliable enterprise applications from reusable components. It defines a set of standardized, modular components, provides a complete set of services to those components, and handles many details of the application behaviour.

This document refers to IBM's WebShpere Application Server in the middle tier of the n-tier architecture which provides a full implementation of the J2EE framework to develop and deploy scalable and distributed enterprise applications. The WebSphere Application Server handle certain low level programming tasks which include transaction services, security, messaging services, naming and directory services, database access and connection pooling, multi-threading realms, load balancing and fault tolerance.

This architecture also uses Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) to provide a framework of distributed components for developing and deploying business logic in the middle tier, thereby considerably easing the development of complex enterprise applications.