AcademicEdge is available as open standard Java/JEE component based enterprise application. The JEE application requires a current Java Runtime Environment (JRE), Web Application Server, Relational Database System, and LDAP Directory Server.

What is a Web Application?

A web application consists of 3 layers:

• The Presentation Layer -- responsible for receiving incoming HTTP request and forming the HTML responses

• The Application Layer -- responsible for the business logic, often implemented in Enterprise Java Beans (EJB 3.0)

• The Database Layer -- responsible for storing data persistently in a relational database system.

 What is an Application Server?

An Application Server is used to develop and deploy Java/JEE applications -- a JEE certified platform for developing and deploying enterprise Java applications, Web applications, and Portals. JBoss Application Server, for example, provides the full range of JEE 1.4/1.5 features as well as extended enterprise services including clustering, caching, and persistence.

• JBoss

• Oracle AS

• Sun AS

• WebLogic

• WebSphere

• Tomcat 5

• Resin

• Orion

• Jonas

• Jetty

• JRun

• Geranimo

What are Enterprise Web Services?
In simple terms, Web services technology is a collection of XML-based standards that provide a means for passing information between applications using XML documents. Web services allow businesses to integrate business processes with suppliers, customers, partners, etc. without regard to the IT infrastructure on which each of these external organizations is operating.

The term enterprise Web Service refers to web services that are available globally throughout the enterprise. For example, a business could choose to share the definition of a process with its' external partners and provide the execution of that process as a Web service. The business would own and maintain that particular process, but others could participate in the process without having the process running as a local Web service.

The notion of enterprise Web services extends beyond shared process definition and execution. Content services, which are typically dispersed, can now be accessible to the enterprise as XML data.

Web services depend on the ability of parties to communicate with each other even if they are using different information systems. XML, a markup language that makes data portable, is a key technology in addressing this need. Enterprises have discovered the benefits of using XML for the integration of data both internally for sharing legacy data among departments and externally for sharing data with other enterprises. As a result, XML is increasingly being used for enterprise integration applications, both in tightly coupled and loosely coupled systems. Because of this data integration ability, XML has become the underpinning for Web-related computing.

Web services also depend on the ability of enterprises using different computing platforms to communicate with each other. This requirement makes the Java platform, which makes code portable, the natural choice for developing Web services. This choice is even more attractive as the new Java APIs for XML become available, making it easier and easier to use XML from the Java programming language.

In addition to data portability and code portability, Web services need to be scalable, secure, and efficient, especially as they grow. The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (JEE™) is specifically designed to fill just such needs. It facilitates the really hard part of developing Web services, which is programming the infrastructure, or “plumbing.” This infrastructure includes features such as security, distributed transaction management, and connection pool management, all of which are essential for industrial strength Web services. And because components are reusable, development time is substantially reduced. Because XML and the Java platform work so well together, they have come to play a central role in Web services. In fact, the advantages offered by the Java APIs for XML and the JEE platform make them the ideal combination for deploying Web services.

What is BPEL and how it is used to create Business Process?

Business process Execution Language (BPEL) is used to compose People, Process and Information into a Business Process. BPEL provides a flexible means to compose the components into business processes in response to changing operating environments. Business Process consists of a Service Bus, a set of Service Protocols, Service Descriptions and Service Implementation. Corresponding technologies are: ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Service Description Language) and various programming languages (Java, C#, C++, etc.).

A servlet is a Java programming language class used to extend the capabilities of servers that host applications access via a request-response programming model. Although servlets can respond to any type of request, they are commonly used to extend the applications hosted by Web servers. For such applications, Java Servlet technology defines HTTP-specific servlet classes. Building Web pages on the fly is useful (and commonly done) for a number of reasons:

• The Web page is based on data submitted by the user. For example the results pages from search engines are generated this way, and programs that process orders for e-commerce sites do this as well.

• The data changes frequently. For example, a weather-report or news headlines page might build the page dynamically, perhaps returning a previously built page if it is still up to date.

The Web page uses information from institution databases or other such sources. For example, you would use this for making a Web page at an on-line store that lists current prices and number of items in stock.

A JSP page is a text document that contains two types of text: static template data, which can be expressed in any text-based format, such as HTML, SVG, WML, and XML, and JSP elements, which construct dynamic content.

The JSP elements in a JSP page can be expressed in two syntaxes-standard and XML-though any given file can only use one syntax. A JSP page in XML syntax is an XML document and can be manipulated by tools and APIs for XML documents.

JavaServer Pages (JSP) allows the separation of the dynamic part of web pages from the static HTML. One writes the regular HTML in the normal manner, and encloses the code for the dynamic parts in special tags, most of which start with "<%" and end with "%>".

For example, here is a section of a JSP page that results in something like "Thanks for using AcademicEdge" for a URL of http://host/AcademicEdge.jsp?title=AcademicEdge

Thanks for using

<I><%= request.getParameter("title") %></I>

The MVC architecture is a widely used architectural approach for interactive applications that separates functionality among application objects so as to minimize the degree of coupling between the objects. To achieve this, it divides applications into three layers: model, view, and controller. Each layer handles specific tasks and has responsibilities to the other layers:

What is Jakarta Struts?

Jakarta Struts is an application development framework -- a set of cooperating classes that constitute a reusable design. A framework dictates an architecture for the application -- its overall structure, partitioning into classes and objects, and how the classes and objects collaborate and their control.

Java Server Faces technology is a server-side user interface framework for Java technology-based Web applications. The main components of JavaServer Faces technology are:

One of the greatest advantages of JavaServer Faces technology is that it offers a clean separation between behavior and presentation. Web applications built with JSP technology partially achieve this separation. However, a JSP application cannot map HTTP requests to component-specific event handling or manage UI elements as stateful objects on the server. JavaServer Faces technology allows you to build Web applications that implement finer-grained separation of behavior and presentation traditionally offered by client-side UI architectures.

The separation of logic from presentation also allows each member of a Web application development team to focus on their piece of the development process, and provides a simple programming model to link the pieces together. For example, Page Authors with no programming expertise can use JavaServer Faces technology UI component tags to link to application code from within a Web page without writing any scripts.

What is XML?

XML, short for eXtensible Markup Language, is a technology developed by a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML emphasizes document structure, which is distinct from the document presentation. XML puts information in a form that is reusable in many different ways, eliminating the need to conform to a proprietary data format or specific operating system. With XML, any type of structured information can be passed seamlessly between different applications and computing systems, which makes XML an incredibly flexible, vendor-neutral, platform independent technology. XML is actually a family of standards emerging under W3C guidance that includes modules and tools for performing specific task with the XML markup language.

What is XML Schema?

XML Schemas provide a standard syntax for defining the structure of how the XML data is organized, which data types are permissible, and what constraints might apply to each element within an XML document (e.g. this element is a date field of a specific format, the field is required, etc.).

What is XPath?
XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for finding information or elements (and attributes, processing instructions, etc.) in an XML document. It was created to provide a common syntax for querying and addressing the contents of XML documents. The XPath syntax consists of string-based expressions that locate specific elements in an XML document and return the value of the elements, attributes, etc. that match the request as defined in the XPath expression.

What is Document Object Model (DOM)?
The Document Object Model, commonly referred to as DOM, is another by-product of the W3C recommendations for XML standards (or any content with similar structure, such as HTML, SGML, etc.). A DOM uses standard syntax to describe a document as a hierarchical series of objects. It identifies each element in an XML document as an individual object, and defines the hierarchical relationship of those objects within the document.

AcademicEdge student services software uses an integrated development environment (IDE) for JEE application development. Traditional JEE application development is quite involved and time consuming. We use a suitable JEE IDE that allows rapid design and development of industry standard JEE business application. Some of the IDEs are: Eclipse, Oracle 10g, JBoss IDE, and Sun Studio Creator. The resulting application consists of Java classes, JSP files, HTML files and data base tables that work in many application server (Oracle, JBoss, Tomcat, etc.), database server (Oracle, DB2, MySQL), and LDAP server.

These IDEs facilitate development of AcademicEge components, expose them as web services  and compose them into end-to-end business processes.