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.
• Don’t 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 Façade
 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 façade is usually provided to hide the underlying

complexity from the client.
 A session bean is used as a session façade to perform
coarse grained functionality .
 The session bean will probably interact with two or more
entity beans .
 A session façade 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 Façade 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 Façade 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 façade 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 façade 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 Monson-
Haefel