Appendix A: Implementing View Technologies

Overview

This appendix is intended as a reference to accompany Chapters 12 and 13. It discusses how the MVC web application framework discussed in Chapter 12 supports any view technology without the need to modify controller or model code.

It first considers how this framework decouples controllers and views, and then looks at how the framework supports those view technologies discussed in Chapter 13. For each technology we'll look at:

• Any installation and configuration required for web applications using it

• How our MVC framework supports this technology, and the basic Java code required to integrate with it, whatever framework we use

• How to define views of this type in applications using this framework

Finally we look at how new, custom view implementations can be implemented within this framework, to support other view technologies or provide sophisticated, application-specific behavior.

Important 

Although this appendix is primarily concerned with the MVC web framework introduced in Chapter 12, the information about installing and configuring view technologies applies to all web applications. The code examples illustrating integration with each view technology can also be used as the basis of your own implementation code.

Note 

This chapter contains some lengthy code listings. However, space constraints mean that these aren't all complete. I've tried to show the central code needed to achieve each task (however, please refer to the code in the sample application and accompanying infrastructure packages for complete implementations of the approaches discussed).