Servlets and JavaServer Pages: The J2EE Technology Web Tier

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Chapter 15. Building a Complete Web Application

This is itthe last chapter! So far you have learned about coding Servlets, JavaServer Pages, JavaBeans, custom tags, and Filters. Rounding out these skills several popular design patterns such as Model 2, Model 1½, multi-client design, and internationalization have been included. Finally, several practical topics such as error handling, security, and database access have been discussed so that you can truly create a complete Web Application using Servlets and JSP. However, there still exists one sole deficiency in this book's content. At no time has a real, complete Web Application been built. Each chapter focused entirely on a single subject. Several times chapters relied on previous chapters' material, but the chapters have never been combined into what you are really trying to do: build a complete Web Application.

The final chapter of this book is going to provide a review of the entire book's material as it should best be done: by building a complete Web Application. When writing a book it is easy to claim "in practice you will need to use this" or to create a contrived example to illustrate a good point. This book has done both, and rightly so because for educational purposes, that is often the best method of introducing a good concept. However, readers of this book are assumed to be paid professionals or those working on becoming suchgenerally people who need to be able to build a complete Web Application. Following up on such an assumption, it is now time to demonstrate exactly what this book is all about: building a complete Web Application using Servlets and JSP. At each possible point while building the Web Application, a complete discussion is provided on what is being built, which is essentially a review of the content in the various chapters that constitute this book.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

• Designing a Web Application.

• Distributing the workload; dividing up who does what.

• Implementing database support; creating a database and using JDBC.

• Implementing Business Logic; Filters and the Model 2 design pattern.

• Implementing Presentation Logic; JSP, Multi-Client Design, and Internationalization.

• Finishing up the site: security, error handling, link tracking, caching, and compression.

The topics should be no surprise. Everything is a logical part of a Web Application, and everything is a topic that has been covered in detail by this book. At every part of this chapter, discussion will be provided on why each part of the Web Application is being built as it is, but discussion will not replace having read the earlier chapters of this bookit is assumed you have read the book in its entirety. Do read this chapter straight through. It provides several tips and techniques for building a complete Web Application.

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