J2EE Design patterns

Sharath Sahadevan
August 8 , 2002
St Louis Java SIG

Design Patterns ?
What are Design Patterns ?

Design Patterns ?
Design Patterns capture solutions that have developed
and evolved over time . They reflect untold redesign and
recoding as developers have struggled for greater reuse
and flexibility in their software.-

GOF in Design
Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object
Oriented Software.

Why study patterns ?

Develop better products.
Learn from others experience.
Improve communication with others in the
same field.
Dont reinvent the wheel.

Brief History of Patterns

In 1970, Christopher Alexander documented patterns in Civil Engineering
and architecture
Software design patterns popularized by
GOF ( Gang of Four )

J2EE
Java 2 Platform ,Enterprise Edition
Provides a unified platform for developing
distributed , server-centric applications.

J2EE Patterns
Front Controller
View Helper
Dispatcher View
Service To Worker
Intercepting Filter

J2EE patterns
Service Locator
Session Faade
Message Facade
Business Delegate
Value Object

J2EE Patterns
Value List Handler
Primary key generation strategies
Data Access Object
Resource Adapter

Front Controller
Provides a centralized controller for managing the
handling of a request .
The front controller will look at the request and forward it
on to the right handler or jsp .
Good place to have the licensing and security code .
It can be either a jsp or servlet. Preferably a servlet .
Controller sequence diagram

Front Controller
Advantages
Promotes reuse of common code that is needed for all
requests .
Promotes flexibility
Easier to maintain

Front Controller
Avoid fat controllers .
Do not restrict site to one controller.
Different subsystems could have their own controllers.

View Helper
View Helpers are Java beans or custom tags
that are used to get the data that needs to be
presented.
Do not use Servlets for views.
Improves reuse and maintainability.
Reduces scriptlet code.
View Helper sequence

Dispatcher View
Dispatcher is responsible for view
management and navigation .
Can be encapsulated within a controller, a
view or as a separate component.
Dispatcher view suggests deferring content
retrieval to the time of view processing.
Dispatcher sequence

Service To Worker
Similar to dispatcher view , but the dispatcher is more
sophisticated.
In Service To Worker the dispatcher will call upon a helper
to determine the next view.
Controller takes on significant responsibility. It manages
content retrieval , validation, authorization etc.
The data retrieved is stored in a value object for use by the
view.

Intercepting Filter
Create Pluggable filters to process common services in a standard
manner , without requiring changes to the core request .
Introduced in Servlet specification 2.3
Filters allow on the fly transformations of payload and
header of both the request into a resource and the response
from a resource.
Filters do not generally create a response or respond to a
request as servlets do , rather they are used to modify the
request or the response.

Intercepting filters
Related to the decorator ( GOF ) pattern
Front controller provides similar functionality , but is
better suited to handling core processing.
Examples of filter use - authentication filters , logging &
auditing , Image conversion , data compression ,
encryption

Intercepting filter
How to write a filter ?
Implement the javax.servlet.Filter interface
Container will call the doFilter() method.
The doFilter method will modify the request or response
and then call the next filter in the filter chain.

Intercepting filter
Configuring a filter in the deployment descriptor ( web.xml ) :
<filter>

<filter-name>Image Filter</filter-name>
<filter-class>com.acme.ImageFilter</filter-class>

</filter>
<filter-mapping>

<filter-name>Image Filter</filter-name>

<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>

</filter-mapping>

Session Facade
A faade is usually provided to hide the underlying
complexity from the client.
A session bean is used as a session faade to perform
coarse grained functionality .
The session bean will probably interact with two or more
entity beans .
A session faade combined with a Data Access Object can
be used for read only data.

Session Facade
Advantages:
Improved transaction control
Exposes fewer remote interfaces to the client.
Improves performance by reducing the number of fine
grained method calls from the client.

Session Faade sequence diagram

Message Facade
Use a message driven bean (MDB) for asynchronous communication .
The client can submit a message on a Java Message Service ( JMS )
Queue or a Topic .
The MDB is configured to listen for any messages . When a message
is received , the MDB will pick it up and process the message .

Message Facade
Asynchronous communication - The client can send the
message on the JMS destination and is free to continue
processing
Guaranteed delivery of message - If some part of the
system is down the JMS destination can be configured so
that all the messages are persistent .
MDB's do not have return values
MDB's do not propagate exceptions back to the clients .
Usually an e-mail is generated to inform the client of
success or failure of the use-case .
Message Faade sequence diagram

Business Delegate
Plain Java classes that hide EJB API complexity by encapsulating code
required to discover, delegate to and recover from invocations on the
session and message faade EJB layers.
Use on large projects where the web team is separate from the EJB
team .

Value Object
A value object is an object that encapsulates all the data required by a
client .
The client can then call get methods on the value object to get all the
data needed by the client .

When a client requests an Entity or a Session bean for business data ,

the bean should construct a value object and return it to the client .

Value Object Sequence

Data Access Object

Use a Data Access Object ( DAO ) to abstract all access to
a data source.
The DAO will help to hide details of access to the data
source from the client.
Promotes easier migration from one data source to another
.

Data Access Object Sequence

Service Locator
Is a Singleton that is used to reuse code performing the JNDI lookup .
Abstracts complexity
Provides uniform service access to Clients
Improves performance
Sometimes referred to as the EJBHomeFactory ( EJB
design patterns ) .

Service Locator sequence

Primary Key Generation

strategies
How can we generate primary keys for entity beans ?
Sequence Blocks
UUID for EJB
Stored Procedures for Autogenerated keys

Primary Key Generation

strategies
Sequence blocks
Uses a stateless session bean and a CMP entity bean .
The CMP entity bean represents a sequence in the
database.
A session faade will front the sequence entity bean .It
will get blocks of integers at a time and cache them
locally.

Primary Key Generation

strategies
UUID for EJB
Create primary keys in memory by creating a universally unique
identifier (UUID ) that combines enough system information to make
it unique .
Very fast .

Primary Key Generation

strategies
Stored Procedures for Autogenerated key
Stored procedures are used to insert the data and return
the generated key . The stored procedure is called from the
entity beans ejbCreate() method.
Uses JDBC CallableStatement to call the stored
procedure.

Value List Handler

Used to retrieve large amounts of data
Provides alternatives to EJB Finders for
large queries.
Cache query results on server side.
Value List Handler sequence

Resource Adapter
J2EE Connector Architecture
Deploy the Resource Adapter on the
application server.
Vendors develop adapters for their systems
Application developers can take advantage
of the connection pooling managed by the
application server.

Resource Adapter
Resource Adapters are packaged in a .rar
file and deployed on the application server.
J2EE connector architecture

References
Design Patterns , Elements of Reusable
Object-Oriented Software - GOF
Core J2EE Patterns, Best Practices and
Design Strategies. - Deepak Alur, John Crupi ,
Dan Malks
EJB Design Patterns - Floyd Marinescu
Enterprise Java Beans - Richard MonsonHaefel