1.5. Why a Book of Success Stories?

First, this book of success stories exists because it can exist. That is, there are a lot of organizations out there today designing and building applications based on J2EE technologies. This book presents just a handful of the applications that we're aware of. Many IT departments are now specifying J2EE compatibility as a requirement in new systems they acquire. A wide range of industry partners are providing J2EE-compatible products. The J2EE platform is a success.

In terms of information about J2EE, there are already a number of publications available, from Sun Microsystems, our J2EE partners, and other publishers and Web sites, describing technical aspects of the J2EE platform in detail.

Sun Microsystems and Java software group provide many resoures. The J2EE platform specification, along with the EJB, JSP, Servlets, and other related specifications, define the core functionality of J2EE. They are available at http://java.sun.com/j2ee/specifications. The J2EE SDK, which allows developers to try this new platform before they buy one of the offerings described in this book, is available at http://java.sun.com/j2ee/downloads. The Java Tutorial, Enterprise Edition, (available at http://java.sun.com/j2ee/tutorial) focuses on how to get started developing enterprise applications with J2EE. The J2EE Blueprints book (Designing Enterprise Applications with J2EE) and the Blueprints Web site (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/blueprints) discuss design considerations for architecting applications to take best advantage of the features of J2EE.

The information in this book is different from other resources in a couple of ways. First, it focuses on real-world applications built using J2EE technology. It looks at specific business applications of the J2EE platform and discusses why the technology was appropriate for the problem at hand. It describes architectural configurations that were made possible by J2EE and how they suit certain requirements, such as time to market, robustness, scalability, and other features required by modern distributed applications. Where possible, it describes alternative technology choices that may have been considered in the process of developing the particular system, and explores the reasons why J2EE technology best suited the technical and business requirements of the customer. It also explores alternate architectures using J2EE that may have been considered for a particular application, and explains how the design decisions and tradeoffs that resulted in a real application were made. This book has its own Web site (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/inpractice), where you'll find the customer success stories here plus additional real-world experiences, as adoption of the J2EE platform continues.

In addition to its focus on the real world, this book's development was very much in keeping with the community process for evolving J2EE and other Java technologies. Each of the case studies represents a partnership between Sun J2EE licensees, and their customers—that is, the folks building successful J2EE-based products, and the folks acquiring those products to solve the problems they face day to day. This is very much a community effort. The licensees and customers who have participated in the preparation of this book are all interested in furthering the adoption of the J2EE platform. Each success story in this book represents a pioneering effort to try the technology and to work with it to solve business problems.

Before looking at the business applications of J2EE, the next chapter focuses on its technology. It takes a closer look at both the individual technologies in the platform and at the ways they work together to provide a complete platform for distributed application development.

For more on the J2EE platform, see http://java.sun.com/j2ee. For more on these J2EE case studies, see http://java.sun.com/j2ee/inpractice.