J2EE or Java Web Services?

[John]

I am experienced at using J2SE for application development (including over
The Internet), but have only recently started developing web pages. At the
moment I use PHP for database connectivity, but I find it messy for anything
other than small projects.

I am planning to download and experiment with either J2EE or Java Web
Services, but from the descriptions of the two products it seems that they
do similar things. What is the difference, and which factors decide which of
the two one should learn or develop with?

As far as I can see they can both be used to provide applications as well as
web service.

TIA

John

[Chris]

Just to clear one point of terminology: web services are part of the
new J2EE platform, not a separate entity as such.

The J2EE platform specifies such things as JDBC (for database access),
EJBs (for business process modelling, transactions, etc), servlets and
JSPs (front-end, session management) amongst other goodies.

It also specifies web-services which is a SOAP-based mechanism for
business-to-business communication between systems (usually over
t'internet, and not necessarily Java-based).

All of these technologies utilise web-servers and application-servers,
which you can buy or download free ones (e.g. Tomcat, Apache, Jonas,
etc).

It sounds like you're implementing a web-based system, in which case
you'll want to investigate servlets / JSPs, web-servers and maybe EJB
/ JDBC for back-end access to a database. Unless you need B-to-B then
web-services probably won't be of interest.

- sarge

[shay]

Oracle JDeveloper 10g will give you a way to base your JSP pages on
either JDBC, EJB or Web-services. And you'll get to do this in a
visual way with a visual HTML editor and drag and drop data binding
which will give you an experience similar to what you are used to
from the J2SE development.
http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev - take the tutorials to see how it
works.