Just a few hours later . . .

Before the end of the day, the BigTel engineers have installed and set up the WebLogic Server and have written some simple servlets to display data from tables in the corporate database. They used WebLogic JSP and WebLogic's great JDBC support -- along with WebLogic's built-in web server that automatically compiles the JSP pages. They were viewing data in a browser page like this within minutes.

We join the Java engineer with Mr. Imayess, the IS director, and Ms. Veep. The Java engineer has been explaining the group's work. "Here are records from the customer database that we're using for the pilot project," the Java engineer said.

"This servlet uses a JDBC connection from a pool of connections that are created by the WebLogic Server when it starts. None of the sensitive information about logging into the database crosses the wire to the browser -- it's all internal, set up as a WebLogic Server configuration property. It's also efficient, since the pool's connections get created just once, and then reused," the Java engineer explained. "Let me sketch this on the whiteboard.

To display customer records in a browser, the BigTel engineers designed an HTML page and just inserted this bit of Java inside JSP tags.

<%
  // We're using a connection from the bigtel pool
  conn = new weblogic.jdbc.pool.Driver().connect("jdbc:weblogic:pool:bigtel", null);
  new TableElement(new TableDataSet(conn, "customer").fetchRecords()).output(out);
%>

The database you'll use in the interactive tour is Cloudscape's pure-Java JBMS database. (In the interactive tour, each time you revisit or reload this page, you'll see the latest snapshot of the customer table. In this online version, you're seeing a static snapshot of the database.) You can click on any of the records below to view details, or you can continue on to the Problem table on the next page.