Overview of Application Components

The bigrez.com example is large enough that we will start our discussion of its contents by presenting a list of the major groups of components in the application and a high-level picture of the work directory structure. These will help you understand the role of the components listed in this chapter in the overall application design. Note that complete source listings of all components would require a prohibitive amount of space, so we are including only listings of key components that emphasize steps and techniques covered in the text. You are encouraged to download the complete example program and installation instructions from the companion Web site (http://www. wiley .com/compbooks/masteringweblogic).

The application components have been split into six separate groups:

User site display components including display JSP pages, JSP include files, style sheets, and key configuration and descriptor files, located in the web-user subdirectory
Administration site display components including the same types of components for the administration Web application, located in the web-admin subdirectory
Form beans used by form pages in both sites for entry and update of business data, located in the com/bigrez/form/* subdirectories
Action classes and helpers representing the controller components in the architecture and any controller helper classes, located in the com/bigrez/ui/* subdirectories
Utilities and value objects including classes shared by the Web application- and business- tier layers of the architecture, located in the com/bigrez/ utils /* and com/bigrez/val subdirectories
EJB components used by both sites to encapsulate persistence services and complex business logic, located in the com/bigrez/ejb/* subdirectory

These groups are reflected in the overall structure of the working directory shown in Figure 4.1. This structure incorporates the development environment best practices discussed in Chapter 13.

Figure 4.1: Working directory structure for the bigrez.com application.

Some of the directories shown in Figure 4.1 contain components required during the build and packaging process, topics we ll cover in Chapters 5 and 8. This chapter will emphasize the presentation-tier components in the web-user and web-admin directories along with form, user interface, value, and utility components in selected directories in the java directory structure.

All source code, Web components, images, and key configuration files are located in the working directory structure. The build process, driven by the build.xml file, assembles the components appropriately and places them in the WebLogic Server domain during the build process. Chapter 5 discusses deployment and management of WebLogic Server Web applications and details the steps required to package and deploy the bigrez.com application.