A survey on the Java-based approaches for Web database connectivity

The popularity of the Web makes the efficient access of distributed databases from Web clients an important topic. Various methods for Web database integration have been proposed but there is an increasing interest on those based on Java. This is due to the Inherent advantages of Java, which supports platform independence and secure program execution, and produces a small size of compiled code. In this experimental paper, we evaluate all currently available Java-based approaches. These include Java applets, Java Sockets, Servlets, remote method invocation, CORBA, and mobile agents. To this end, we implemented a Web client accessing a remote database using each of these approaches and compared their behavior along the following important parameters: (1) peformance expressed in terms of response time under different loads, (2) transparency of communication expressed in terms of complexity of networking API, and (3) extensibility expressed in terms of ease of adding new components.