Sean Blanton and Michael Sayko – October 2003
The Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Sun Microsystems’ standard for developing distributed applications, gained much attention from software designers because of its use of a container-based component model. The J2EE standard dictates that the components of a distributed application run in containers. Containers, which are J2EE runtime environments, provide required services to application components. While this conceptually powerful model provides great flexibility for software architects and developers, it can add complexity and pose challenges for engineers tasked with building and deploying J2EE applications in typical enterprise environments.