HP-UX Java™ - How To Develop Java Applications for HP-UX

1 Introduction
This paper describes the mechanics of developing or porting an application to run on
or be hosted by an HP-UX server. The information is applicable to both HP9000 PA-RISC
and HP Integrity (Itanium) platforms. The paper presents several alternatives for the
development platform and recommends a number of development tools for each of
the alternatives. The Development lifecycle is discussed, including the steps of code
creation, source code control, debugging, and performance tuning. In addition, this
paper provides directions for setting up the HP-UX environment for optimal running
of Java™ applications.
The HP-UX server platform is ideally suited for deploying Java-based applications.
The Apache Web Server and the HP-UX Java™ Virtual Machine provide a low-cost,
high-performance foundation for the most sophisticated enterprise applications. A
comprehensive set of development tools is available to develop applications on this
platform or to port applications from other platforms. These tools also provide the
means for tuning the application and the environment to realize the outstanding
performance and scalability that is inherent in HP-UX itself.
Structure of typical applications
A typical application is built using an n-tier model. Not all applications contain all of
the tiers, but this is a good general model for the purpose of this paper. The advantages
of the n-tier structure are:
• The infrastructure is already provided by means of industry-standard components:
web browsers, web servers, and application servers. They have already been
developed and tested by the platform vendor or by various partners and do not
need to be developed from scratch.
• These infrastructure components are capable of load balancing and automatic
fail-over, thus providing both scalability and reliability.
• The portions of the application that run on these standard components are easily
ported to other platforms, particularly those that support the same application
server.
The various types of web and Java™ software to be developed are briefly described
below. Each of these software components can be developed for HP-UX deployment
by using the tools described later in this paper.
HTML - HyperText Markup Language - This is a document-formatting language that
is used to create web pages. It has the capability of doing simple formatting using basic
text or it can also contain embedded graphics and/or Java™ programs to be executed
on the client.
Applet - A Java™ program that runs in the context of a web browser. Applets are
commonly passed to a client computer within an html stream and run on the client
using a Java™ Virtual Machine that is referenced by the client browser. An applet is
4 Introduction