Art of Java Web Development

A guide to the topics required for state of the art web development, this book covers wide-ranging topics, including a variety of web development frameworks and best practices. Beginning with coverage of the history of the architecture of web applications, highlighting the uses of the standard web API to create applications with increasingly sophisticated architectures, developers are led through a discussion on the development of industry accepted best practices for architecture. Described is the history and evolution towards this architecture and the reasons that it is superior to previous efforts. Also provided is an overview of the most popular web application frameworks, covering their architecture and use. Numerous frameworks exist, but trying to evaluate them is difficult because their documentation stresses their advantages but hides their deficiencies. Here, the same application is built in six different frameworks, providing a way to perform an informed comparison. Also provided is an evaluation of the pros and cons of each framework to assist in making a decision or evaluating a framework on your own. Finally, best practices are covered, including sophisticated user interface techniques, intelligent caching and resource management, performance tuning, debugging, testing, and Web services.

Table of Contents:
Part I The evolution of web architecture and design 1 1 State-of-the-art web design 3 1.1 A brief history of Java web development 4 1.2 The importance of design patterns 6 The Model-View-Controller design pattern 7 The emergence of Model 2 9 Evolution 10 1.3 Using frameworks 11 A flavor of the Struts framework 12 A flavor of the Turbine framework 14 Objectively choosing a framework 20 1.4 Best practices 20 Business rules 20 Where should the rules reside? 22 Leveraging best practices 24 1.5 Summary 25   2 Building web applications 27 2.1 Building web applications with servlets 29 The eMotherEarth servlet application 29 Evaluating the servlet approach 50 2.2 Building web applications with JSP 50 The JSP eMotherEarth application 51 Evaluating the JSP approach 59 2.3 Summary 60   3 Creating custom JSP tags 61 3.1 The case for custom tags 62 3.2 The tag interfaces 63 The Tag interface 63 The IterationTag interface 64 The BodyTag interface 65 3.3 Building simple tags 66 The HtmlSqlResult tag 66 Registering the tag 71 3.4 Validating tag attributes 75 Adding DbPool to the application tag 75 3.5 Using prebuilt tags 80 Using JSTL 81 Using other taglibs 84 3.6 Custom tag considerations 86 Resource usage 87 Building a framework 88 3.7 Now that weíre here, where are we? 88 3.8 Summary 89   4 The Model 2 design pattern 91 4.1 Using Model 2 as your framework 92 The Model 2 schedule application 93 Options in Model 2 116 4.2 Parameterizing commands with controller servlets 117 An example of parameterizing commands 118 Advantages and disadvantages 127 4.3 Summary 128 Part II Web frameworks 131 5 Using Struts 133 5.1 Building Model 2 Web applications with Struts 134 The Struts schedule application 134 Value objects as form beans 136 Objectifying commands with Strutsí actions 137 Configuring Struts applications 139 Using Strutsí custom tags to simplify JSP 142 Internationalization with Struts 145 Strutsí support for data entry 147 Declarative validations 151 5.2 Evaluating Struts 156 5.3 Summary 157   6 Tapestry 159 6.1 Overview 160 6.2 The architecture 160 6.3 A simple Tapestry application 162 Tapestry Hello, World 162 6.4 The Tapestry framework 167 Framework classes and interfaces 167 Components 170 6.5 Scheduling in Tapestry 173 Bootstrapping the application 173 The Home page 176 The custom table component 180 The Add page 185 6.6 Evaluating Tapestry 192 Documentation and samples 192 Debugging support 195 Using Tapestry 196 6.7 Summary 197   7 WebWork 199 7.1 Overview 200 The architecture 201 The configuration 202 7.2 Key concepts 203 Actions 204 Key interfaces 204 The value stack 205 Expression language 206 BeanInfo classes 207 Templates 207 7.3 Scheduling in WebWork 208 The configuration 208 The View page 209 The Add page 214 Validations 220 7.4 Evaluating WebWork 224 7.5 Summary 226   8 InternetBeans Express 227 8.1 Overview 228 8.2 The architecture 230 DataExpress 230 InternetBeans Express 233 8.3 InternetBeans Express components 234 ixPageProducer 234 ixComponents 236 8.4 Scheduling with InternetBeans 237 Data connectivity 238 The View page 242
About the Author :
Neal Ford is the chief technology officer at the DSW Group, Ltd. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video presentations and the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques and JBuilder 3 Unleashed. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.