A multitude of technologies are presently available for the development of Web applications, each having its strengths and weaknesses. Three of them that are used on the Java 2 platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) are introduced in this thesis. They are JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL), and eXten- sible Markup Language Compiler (XMLC). The functionality that is representative of a generic OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) client has been implemented using three approaches that are based on the above technologies: JSP with embedded Java; JSP with JSTL tags; and XMLC. The functionality includes producing a custom map with layers retrieved from different WMS servers; manipulating views of the map; querying information about features of a location selected on the map by the user, and so on. In this thesis we evaluate and compare the three approaches from the perspective of application architecture, development, and maintenance, based on our implementation experience. We also present the design and setting up of a local Web mapping system on which the WMS client being implemented has been running.