### Java Connection Toolkit for VisualAge

The Java Connection Toolkit (JCT) helps you to transfer data or business objects between Java clients and Smalltalk server applications in a complex client/server system architecture:

If you are developing client/server applications with VisualAge for Smalltalk 4.0 and want to add Internet or Intranet clients for data entry/manipulation purposes, JCT can give you several advantages:

#### Bi-directional Communication

Web Connection feature uses CGI or similar interfaces for communication. These interfaces are request-oriented, i.e. communication can only be initiated by the client. JCT uses Socket-to-Socket connections. Each client has to register to the server and is handled by a separate communication process. Clients can be notified by the server if necessary. That way manipulation of existing data objects with several clients including persistency checks would be possible.

#### Flexible Clients

Because client side communication is handled by Java classes and not by a web browser application, clients can be designed both as Java applet or Java application. Applets can be plugged into any HTML page. You are no more restricted to the page generation mechanism of the Web Connection feature - especially if you usually design your web pages with special HTML tools. Besides when developing clients with the Web Connection feature each attribute of each business object class has to be mapped separately to a HTML input field. With JCT, Java clients you only have to map class definitions. Additionally you can use the full power of Java GUI objects and perform jobs like validation checks already on the client.

#### Easy to Configure

The JCT uses the object serialization mechanism which is part of the Java language specification since JDK 1.1 to encode/decode the transferred objects. You just have to define the mapping between Java and Smalltalk classes and don't have to care about data coding. Transferable objects are responsible for encoding themselves into an object stream. After the transfer to the receiver an instance of the corresponding class is created and initialized with the decoded attributes automatically.

The Smalltalk classes of JCT are based on the Web server interface support of the VisualAge Web Connection feature 4.0, i.e. VisualAge for Smalltalk 4.0 and Web Connection feature are prerequisites for JCT. The provided Java classes can be used with Visual Age for Java 1.0.

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