J2EE DESIGN PATTERNS

First we sould start with what are design pattern? We can say a design pattern is simply a description of a recurring solution to a problem, given a context.The context is the environment, surroundings, situation, or interrelated conditions within which the problem exists.

Second why do need to use design patterns? Design patterns have a number of advantages like - 1. Once described, any level engineer can use the pattern. 2. They allow for reuse without having to reinvent in every a project. 3. They allow to better define system structure. 4. They provide a design vocabulary. 5. They provide reusable artifacts. 6. Patterns can form frameworks that can then be used for implementations.

In this section we have tried to cover how to use and identify design patterns, in J2EE applications. The interest in design patterns has been around for a number of years in the software industry. However, interest among mainstream software developers is a fairly recent development actually it takes a highly experienced engineer to recognize a pattern, it requires collaboration, and it requires ongoing refinements.

There are a number of patterns that have been identified by the Sun Java Center for the presentation tier. We havve tried to explain them in this section , we are starting with a small explanation and then a complete section on each patterns.

Intercepting Filter : Facilitates preprocessing and post-processing of a request.

Front Controller : Provides a centralized controller for managing the handling of requests.

Composite View : Creates an aggregate View from atomic subcomponents.

View Helper : Encapsulates logic that is not related to presentation formatting into Helper components.

Dispatcher View : Combines a Dispatcher component with the Front Controller and View Helper patterns, deferring many activities to View processing.

Service to Worker :Combines a Dispatcher component with the Front
Controller and View Helper patterns.

Business Delegate :Reduces coupling between presentation-tier clients and business services. It hides the underlying implementation details of the business service, such as lookup and access details of the EJB architecture.

Session Facade : Encapsulate the complexity of interactions between the business objects participating in a workflow. The Session Facade manages the business objects, and provides a uniform coarse-grained service access layer to clients.

Service Locator : Multiple clients can reuse the Service Locator object to reduce code complexity, provide a single point of control, and improve performance by providing a caching facility.

Transfer Object Assembler : It is used to build the required model or submodel. The Transfer Object Assembler uses Transfer Objects to retrieve data from various business objects and other objects that define the model or part of the model.

Value List Handler :The most critical concern in a distributed paradigm is the latency time. Value List Handler Pattern suggests an alternate approach of using ejb-finder methods. The pattern is used to control the search, cache the results and provide the results to the client using a lightweight mechanism.

Composite Entity :It model, represent, and manage a set of interrelated persistent objects rather than representing them as individual fine-grained entity beans. A Composite Entity bean represents a graph of objects.

Transfer Object :Encapsulate the business data. A single method call is used to send and retrieve the Transfer Object. When the client requests the enterprise bean for the business data, the enterprise bean can construct the Transfer Object, populate it with its attribute values, and pass it by value to the client.

Service Activator :Service Activator enables asynchronous access to enterprise beans and other business services. It receive asynchronous client requests and messages. On receiving a message, the Service Activator locates and invokes the necessary business methods on the business service components to fulfill the request asynchronously. In EJB2.0, Message Driven beans can be used to implement Service Activator for message based enterprise applications. The Service Activator is a JMS Listener and delegation service that creates a message façade for the EJBs.

Data Access Object : Abstracts and encapsulate all access to the data source. The DAO manages the connection with the data source to obtain and store data.