Today's distributed e-commerce applications typically rely upon various technologies in their realization, including the web, scripting languages, server-side processing and an underlying database. The combination of these technologies creates a system that requires attention to the security issues of each component and the system as a whole. In considering the overall system, issues arise from the interactions of security frameworks available for each component. In this paper, we consider the approach and related issues for distributed e-commerce applications developed with Java. The flexible nature of Java allows migration of objects (compiled code with state) through features such as RMI and Applets. Security for distributed applications developed in Java has issues and lessons applicable to systems of components built on different technologies.