Web-Application Design and Best Practices

Summary

This chapter covered several topics related to web-application design and best practices, bringing together many of the topics you explored in the previous chapters. First, we discussed why design is important and we recapped the two major architectures for building web applications: page-centric (Model 1)and Model-View-Controller (Model 2). Then we showed how design patterns can help you design your application and described how some of the Java EE patterns can be used to build web applications based on the MVC architecture. These patterns included the following:

• Front controller

• View

• View Helper

• Service to Worker

• Filter

We then moved on to discuss some third-party frameworks such as Struts, WebWork, and Velocity.

After this, we showed how testing is an important part of web-application development and introduced unit testing and functional (or acceptance) testing. Automated testing has now really taken off with regard to web applications, and to illustrate this we discussed some of the testing tools that are now available. We then related testing back to the design aspects we presented earlier in the chapter by showing how the design of a web application can affect the ability to test it.

Finally, we covered some implementation topics, including logging, troubleshooting, and some general guidelines for building web applications.