Enterprise applications

For me, enterprise applications was always a buzzy term. If we substituted enterprise with the word business, it would become business applications, which is, in fact, misleading and a far cry from the true meaning of the term.

The term enterprise applications refer to the type of applications that are used by a group of users. These types of applications include nearly everything around us—social networks, business applications, productivity applications, gaming, chatting, and so on. If we conduct a simple analysis of the commonalities between all of them, we will find that some of their common characteristics include:

• The applications are used by a group of users, with different levels of authority over the provided functionalities
• The applications require special scaling and resource management techniques to be applied in order to be able to handle heavy loads when the application gets more active users or more data
• The application should run on a robust environment, robust enough to provide near 100% system availability
• The applications manage an operational database, with hundreds or thousands of operations performed each second, while keeping our data consistent and responsive

Java EE is you a platform that fulfills all of the aforementioned requirements, and more, with declarative and easy-to-use methodologies. Rather than investing time and effort into those non-functional requirements, you'll build your applications above a middleware software, providing you with a ready-to-use implementation for all required services, leaving you free to focus on your business logic.