We explore by design and implementation the applicability of J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) architecture in supporting wireless services as well as web-based services. This has been demonstrated by implementing a wireless prescription system, which provides wireless services to physicians, and web-based services to pharmacies and administrators. The goal of the wireless prescription system is to improve the efficiency of the healthcare system by reducing the overall time and cost used to create documents and retrieve information. We also present a performance evaluation of the implemented wireless prescription system using latency as the performance metric. In particular, we investigated the overheads associated with different components of the underlying J2EE architecture, which includes the Session Bean, Entity Bean, and the database. We found that the latency overheads introduced by these components account for 3.8-4.3%, 3.9-4.4%, and 91.8% of the total delay experienced inside the J2EE architecture respectively. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
