My name is Sheldon Bradley Wosnick and I currently
work for IBM Canada in the e-business Internet Integration department of IBM Global
Services. Having had significant previous experience with Enterprise Java development
, I have been on assignment for the last seven months at the Toronto IBM Lab working
first on the VisualAge for Java 1.0 development team and more recently as
a core Java developer on the upcoming VisualAge e-business suite which will
feature, in part, VisualAge for Java 1.0 Enterprise Edition and the new release
of DB2 Universal Database 5.0.
My primary responsibilities on the VisualAge
for Java team involved development and software verification testing of the
JDBC-ODBC Bridge, used within VisualAge for Java for enterprise database
connectivity via ODBC database drivers. This involved the Java development of an
entire suite of Java database test programs which exercised all aspects of the Java
Database Connectivity (JDBC) API via ODBC. I have learned a great deal about VisualAge
for Java, Java, JDBC and ODBC as well had the opportunity to do some serious
Enterprise and Distributed Java development.
For VisualAge e-business our team is
currently integrating the best-of-breed Enterprise and Web software development
tools from IBM, Lotus and NetObjects. These tools are designed to meet the requirements
of the professional Java developer seeking a total solution for e-business applications
development. Our intention is to demonstrate how these developer tools can be combined
to produce serious, real Enterprise e-business Internet and Intranet solutions.
I really believe we have a winner here!
My current responsibilities include Java development
of the Enterprise scenarios using IBM DB2 Universal Database 5.0 and Java
server-side programming with Java servlets and CORBA distributed objects using CORBA
with the Internet InterORB Protocol (IIOP) and VisualAge for Java Enterprise
Edition.
Please note that I am totally representing
myself here and I do not in any way represent any past, present or future
views or strategies of IBM. Any and all misrepresentation of information is solely
my doing. Information about either VisualAge for Java or VisualAge e-business
that I have discussed here is readily available information published on our external
website at www.ibm.com/java. Any code submitted is to the public domain and constitutes
programming that I have done in my spare time, some before joining IBM and other
done strictly offline, after hours, to expand my knowledge of servlets and server-side
Java programming. (Have I been clear enough on this matter -- hopefully!).
This rather simple "Universal" client
HTML form is used as the front-end client to call upon the services of a 100%
Pure Java servlet operating on a server back-end somewhere (which is presumably
connected to some DBMS and database server). Any level of distribution is possible;
for example, the servlet may call upon another servlet running on a different server
which calls upon the database server etc. Alternatively, the servlet may initialize
a CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB) and communicate via the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol
(IIOP) with any number of fully distributed, remote objects which could perform
any number and kind of operation(s) at the back-end. The uses are truly limitless!
Servlets are a much better replacement for CGI/HTTP and there are a multitude of
documents on the Web which testify to the superiority of the 'Pure Java' approach
with servlets.
Using a servlet to perform JDBC database
connectivity and database access as I have in this sample servlet means that the
client downloaded to the Web browser is an "ultra thin" client -- a minimal
amount of program logic (easily decompilable intellectual capital) is actually downloaded
from the Web server to it resulting in less calls from the client to the server
(to perform intensive database operations) and less HTTP network traffic. In addition,
the intellectual capital is preserved as the client never gets any of this bytecode
at the client Web browser.
The easiest way to try out this servlet
is to to:
[http://localhost:8080/servlet/DataAccessServlet?UID=swosnick&password=mypasswrd
&1&database=sample&table=employee&driver=COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.app.DB2Driver
&URL=DB2&action=query&SQL=select from employee where workdept
= 'D11'].
To use my data access servlet first enter the following connection information: