The Core: Action Beans and JSPs - Stripes...and Java Web Development is Fun Again - page 28

Chapter 3

The Core:

Action Beans and JSPs

When you're developing a Stripes application, you will find that most
of the work is done in action beans and view templates (JSPs in this
book's examples). You use action beans to perform operations and JSPs
to show the results.

JSPs also give the user an interface to submit requests, and action
beans handle these requests and provide responses. Since action beans
and JSPs play such important roles, we'll take a closer look at how they
work and interact. We also begin building a “webmail” application in
this chapter. This is the sample application that we'll use for the rest of
the topic.

Why a webmail application?

• It's a very familiar application (everyone uses email nowadays), so
the features that we'll implement will feel intuitive.
• We can easily think of many ways to improve the application.
Adding features is a great way to learn more about Stripes and
gain practical experience.
• There are just too many shopping cart applications out there.
• The market for online pet stores is saturated.

We'll start with the contact list, which contains people with their names,
email addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates. Three pages are
involved: a Contact List page with a summary of all contacts in a table,
a Contact View page that shows a contact's complete information, and
a Contact Form page for creating and updating contacts. How you can
navigate from one page to another is illustrated in Figure 3.1 , on the
following page.