Creating a web program that basiclly reads from a DB and calls a script(that may be on a different unix box), how should I start?

So I am sort of new to the who data basing thing although I have played with it a little. That being said I was thinking of creating a Java EE application to do this. Also I have no clue how to run a script on a different unix box, If anyone has a good online tutorial especially开发者_如何学运维 for how to do this, Please Let Me Know. Any other advice would be appreciated.

SSH is the best way to execute a command on a remote Unix box.

How you use SSH from Java is another question. A while ago, I used the Ganymed library, which worked pretty well, but apparently that's not being maintained anymore. There are other similar libraries, but I don't know anything about them. Another option is to call the native SSH client through Runtime.exec().