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.

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.

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