J2EE

Three years ago I began this blog with a discussion of The Java Tutorial. I didn't read it from top to bottom. I took what I needed to do what I wanted to do. I left some quite large chunks unread, so when I decided to research Java Servlets, I fully expected to find them there.

Certainly they were part of a tutorial, but it had an unfamiliar feel to it. When I clicked on the home link, I found myself looking at the J2EE 1.3 Tutorial - "A beginner's guide to developing enterprise applications on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition SDK version 1.3".

"Beginners guide" sounds good, but "developing enterprise applications" is something I neither need nor want to do.

In my first post I suggested that using NetBeans to craft "Hello World" was like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut, and at first glance, using J2EE to make a simple connection between my little applet and a database is worthy of the same analogy. There has to be a simpler way to do it.

During my VB programming days I used ASP, the MS equivalent of JSP, and it really wasn't that hard. In those days, I owned the server, and controlled everything on it, including user accounts and passwords. From memory, the user had to supply credentials every time they accessed the intranet site, so the issue of embedding credentials in code didn't arise.

I have just touched base with my web host, and from my account stats, as well as a MySQL version number, I see one for Apache and PHP. I guess that means I can use PHP. I've never done so before, but from the w3schools site, connecting to a MySQL database doesn't look very hard.

A couple of questions arise. First where is the PHP code hidden, and is that a better place to hide my username and password than an Applet? Second, can my Applet talk to the PHP code and vice versa? I suspect the answer to both questions is NO, but at least reading up on PHP looks a little less daunting than J2EE.