Constructing the Application Skeleton

The first step when creating a new Web application is the construction of the application skeleton. In the bigrez.com Web application, this skeleton consists of the minimum components required to configure and boot the user and administration Web sites and display their respective home pages. This is not simply a Home.jsp page for each site, remember. We are using a Struts servlet-centric architecture and a master-page-assembly presentation approach, so the skeleton must include the basic configuration files and components required to implement our chosen approach.

The skeleton Web applications for both sites consist of the following components:

• The Master.jsp template page for the site, defining the overall page layout and included components

• Supporting view components such as Header.jsp , TopNav.jsp , Footer.jsp , and placeholder versions of view components such as RezInfo.jsp and Offers.jsp

• The PageDisplayServlet , used in page assembly

• The web.xml and weblogic.xml descriptor files, including JSP configuration elements and the servlet mappings from *.do to the Struts ActionServlet and *.page to the PageDisplayServlet

• A placeholder struts-config.xml file with sufficient configuration information, to start the ActionServlet on Web application boot

• Placeholder Home.jsp page, to use as a test page to validate skeleton configuration

These skeleton components, once deployed to the appropriate Web applications in the domain, are sufficient to present the Home.jsp page in the display area of the layout when the Home.page URL is accessed from a browser. On a typical development project, the skeleton components are then placed in source code control to form the starting point for the Web application construction tasks to follow.

Best Practice  

Begin construction by building an application skeleton containing the minimum number of components necessary to configure and start the Web application.