Hi Jim, These questions are probably better addressed to the derby-user mailing list since they have more to do with how to use Derby than with how it is implemented internally. So you probably want to pursue the discussion on that list, as you'll find more people who have experience building applications like the one you describe.
Derby does not provide a JSP container, nor a Servlet container, so if you are interested in writing JSPs and Servlets you'll need to find one. Tomcat is certainly a fine choice; there are plenty of other JSP and Servlet containers out there, but the derby-dev list is probably the wrong place to look for more information about that. When you get to writing your JSPs and Servlets, you merely need to ensure that the derbyclient.jar library is available to them. In the case of most JSP or Servlet containers, there is a simple way to include such a jar library into your web application; for example in Tomcat I believe you just have to place derbyclient.jar into the correct 'lib' directory. Once you have made derbyclient.jar available to your JSP or Servlet, you can simply create a new java.sql.Connection object in your code, using the Derby network-format URL scheme: jdbc:derby://host:port/databaseName;options The ClientDriver class in the derbyclient.jar will then implement all of your JDBC calls using network access to the Network Server instance located in your application. I think that JDK 1.5 is capable of doing everything you've described so far. I believe that JDK 1.6 adds further performance and functionality improvements, but Derby runs great with JDK 1.5 as well as with JDK 1.6 so you can choose whichever you prefer. I believe you are correct that you don't need Java EE in order to write simple JSP and Servlet code. You just need J2SE and a Servlet/JSP container such as Tomcat. I believe there is a great "using Derby with Tomcat" tutorial here: http://db.apache.org/derby/papers/fortune_tut.html There are some links in that tutorial to other Derby-with-Tomcat tutorials. Good luck, and let us know if you run into any problems with Derby; the community will be glad to help. thanks, bryan
