Thesis full text PDF - Politecnico di Milano

5.2. Business requirements and functionalitiesIn our proposal, we want to offer an online graphic tool for the automatic code generation on theJakarta Struts platform, an implementation of the Model 2 paradigm. From an implementationpoint of view, the configuration of the Jakarta Struts controller is specified in the file strutsconfig.xml,that specifies the logics for invoking the action classes, the model objects playing asinterfaces toward the data sources and the business logic.Using the tool the developer is able to define the flow of the application, the view composed bythe JSP pages and the controller which process the user requests and acts as intermediarybetween the business logic and the view. The tool will be composed of a client-side graphicinterface, accessible by a browser, and a server-side environment (JSP script, Java Servlet andJava classes) devoted to the application code generation. The graphic interface of the editor isthe interactive part which allow the user to create the diagram inside the browser whichrepresents the application structure and flow.With the MVC-WebFlow tool the developer is able not only to design web application flowdiagrams but also to store them on a server, to retrieve them and to generate the basic pieces ofthe Struts components, to give users to manage their personal profile and their personalapplication project. We automatically generate the contents of the struts-config.xml file and thestubs of the action classes from the diagram created using the model. The main advantageswhich the tool will grant to the developer are:A simple and quick design of the application model;A good overall vision of the application, with a notation directly referring to the MVCmodels;An independent design of the controller flow and of the called action;An easy reuse of parts of the application defined in the diagram.The tool will be realized for an online usage and based on RIA technologies. A Rich InternetApplication (RIA) is an Internet application that attempts to bridge the usability gap betweendesktop applications and traditional Web sites. At this purpose, it exploits the graphical andexecution capabilities of the clients (namely, the browsers), by adding scripts into the pages,thus providing higher quality of interactivity and an user experience. The most known platformfor RIAs is the AJAX framework, that we adopted for our implementation. In particular, we basedthe GUI of the tool on the opensource Openjacob Draw2D library and other AJAX technologies. Inthe 5.6 Software requirements and system architecture section we will analyze in depth thearchitecture and all the technologies used.47