The J2EE platform provides a variety of options for making business data persistent using DBMS technology. However, the integration with existing backend database systems has proven to be of crucial importance for the scalability and performance of J2EE applications, because modern e-business systems are extremely data-intensive. As a result, the data access layer, and the link between the application server and the database server in particular, are very susceptible to turning into a system bottleneck. In this paper we use the ECperf benchmark as an example of a realistic application in order to illustrate the problems mentioned above and discuss how they could be approached and eliminated. In particular, we show how asynchronous, messagebased processing could be exploited to reduce the load on the DBMS and improve system performance, scalability and reliability. Furthermore, we discuss the major issues related to the correct use of entity beans (the components provided by J2EE for m...
Samuel Kounev, Alejandro P. Buchmann