J2EE development

Before starting to do any J2EE Web development I did my own research on tools and libraries that would best meet my web transaction-based application requirement (e.g. things like flexibiltiy, simplicity, availability, cost, adoption..). I finally decided to go with the Spring Framework for all integration code and parameterization settings, Hibernate on the data tier to handle the ORM aspect, and Struts for the Web tier. I discovered since then that these exact set of tools are promoted by Source Labs (http://www.sourcelabs.com/?page=software&sub=sash) as the SASH stack. Although I appreciated developing using these libraries, I enjoyed even more the best practices that these frameworks encourage through the adoption of sound principle: loose coupling between component, seperation of concerns, design pattern uage like MVC or dependency inversion, etc.

You have a feeling when you're building applications along these principles that it is well architect and clean, however you enjoy it even more when 5-6 months later the client calls you to update its requirements!

Without going into details, the web application developped with these frameworks usually follows architecture along these lines:

1. A seperate and "dumb" View layer (JSP page);
2. A seperate Control layer (action and action setting files in Struts)
3. A separate Model/Business layer (business layer is using simple POJOs following java bean rules which allow dependency injection with Spring)
4. A seperate Data layer (thourgh DAO and Hibernate ORM)
5. An integration and configuration to glue all layers through Spring bean application context file
6. And finally a simple servlet/JSP container server ( e.g. Tomcat) to service and host the application deployment.

As a good advocate of open source, I put my principle into practice by putting such an application available to anyone intrested, just contact me by email and I'll send you a copy of the project.

Martin