Efficiency of standard software architectures for Java-based access to remote databases

Novel client-server architectures for remote database access are increasing ly taking advantage of Web technology, adopting Web browsers as graphic use r interfaces in the clients and traditional SQL database management systems (DBMSs) in the servers. The inter-operation between standard browsers and specific DBMSs is today supported by a number of software architectures bas ed on the Java virtual machine embedded in last generation browsers. Unfort unately such software architectures, which appear excellent from the points of view of openness and flexibility, introduce conspicuous latencies in da tabase access. The objective of this paper is to identify such latencies th rough the analysis of a number of experimental results. The paper describes four different software architectures supporting Java-based SQL database a ccess, reports their performance measurements on different hardware platfor ms and compares the results obtained. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All ri ghts reserved.