Chapter 6. The Sample Application: A Financial Portfolio

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Requirements: Covering Your Rear End

• Starting with the Wireframes

• Developing Use Cases

• Data Sources and Storage

• Choosing Technologies

• Conclusions

It's always useful to have a concrete example to follow along with when you're learning a new technology. Rather than seeing abstract code fragments floating in limbo, you'll learn Struts in detail by watching the construction of a complete Web application.

This application also will serve as a jumping-off point for later chapters, which will demonstrate how to incorporate various technologies such as DynaBeans and Web Services into a Struts application.

The application that will be developed in this book is a stock portfolio manager. You've probably seen more than a few of these because most portal sites such as Yahoo! offer one as a way to make their site "sticky."

This chapter will walk through the requirements, use cases, database schema, and technology selections involved in developing the application. In the next chapter, the application itself will begin to emerge.