Efficiency of Standard Software Architectures for JAVA-Based Access to Remote Databases

Novel client/server architectures for remote database access are increasingly taking advantage of Web technology, adopting Web browsers as graphic user interfaces in the clients and traditional SQL Data Base Management Systems (DBMSs) in the servers. The interoperation between standard browsers and specific DBMSs is today supported by a number of software architectures based on the Java Virtual Machine embedded in last generation browsers. Unfortunately such software architectures, which appear excellent from the points of view of openness and flexibility, introduce conspicuous latencies in database access. The objective of this paper is to identify such latencies through the analysis of a number of experimental results. The paper describes four different software architectures supporting Java based SQL database access, reports their performance measurements on different hardware platforms and compares the results obtained.