Coldbeans Software has announced release of J2J development tool. What is this for ? It is a web development tool that lets you use server-side Java objects right in your JavaScript applications. What is a main idea (ideology) of this product ?

    The nature of web site is a set of pre-formated pages (HTML pages) returned from server by user requests. User has got ability not only request static pages but also transfer (send) some data to server (post or get requests). Server can proceed these requests and make some back-end job (e.g. fill database) as well as generate HTML pages on the fly. All this stuff follows from the nature of HTTP protocol and is pretty standard and well known at this moment. For programming such kind of functionality you can use different tools (Perl, PHP, Java servlets, Java server pages, active server pages, some markup languages like ColdFusion etc.). In the same time many of tasks can be done on the clients site. The most nature way to do that is JavaScript. When your tasks are performed by client you can avoid extra data transfer, avoid full page repainting when server side application return new html stuff etc.

    What is offered by Coldbeans? The idea of J2J product is the usage of standard Java objects (classes) for your JavaScript applications. You can call methods of server based Java classes from your JavaScript applications and use results of Java computation right within your client-based application. So you can save all your JavaScript programs and add new functionality by direct access to your server side Java.

    How we can do that ? J2J replaces your page (on the fly) by some frameset, where one hidden frame contains small Java applet (bridge) used for the communications with the server side Java objects. For your JavaScript access to any  method from server based Java class looks like standard call:

    java.myClass.myMethod(list_of_parameters)

All linking information will be generated by J2J servlet.

    J2J implementation is a Java servlet and one small Java applet.  So all your pages served by J2J will be preprocessed by this servlet. You can pass your pages as a parameter for this servlet (it means just use
    http://host/servlet/J2J?your_page instead of
    http://host/jour_page)
or define some mapping for your servletrunner when all files with the specified extension (e.g. j2j) will be parsed by J2J servlet automatically. This servlet will generate on the fly all functionality needed for the connection with the server side Java objects. Bridge applet used for this communication is less than 2Kb and uses HTTP communications for access to your server data. So this approach should be free from the firewall's restriction.

The latest version of J2J can be downloaded from our site.

See tools page