Peter Späth - Beginning Java MVC 1.0: Model View Controller Development to Build Web, Cloud, and Microservices Applications

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484262795 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Starting at the very infancy of software creation, developers tried to modularize their applications in order to streamline their projects and increase the maintainability of the software they created. Soon, a very basic segregation scheme was identified: One part of the software must deal with data and persistence, another part must deal with presenting the data to the user, and one last part must handle data input and frontend view propagation.

This segregation scheme showed up in so many projects that it was promoted to a common software design pattern, called Model-View-Controller, or MVC for short. Its power also manifested in its versatility, even with big paradigm changes, like the onset of the Internet age. With database products for the model layer, browsers for the view layer, and some kind of user input processing for the controller layer, the patterns accuracy and applicability to the majority of software projects became even more apparent with web applications.

Interestingly, even though most web application frameworks under the hood apply some kind of MVC layer demarcation, Java Server products up to JEE 7 did not include a dedicated MVC framework. With JSR-371 (Java Specification Request number 371) only recently and starting with JEE 8/Jakarta EE 8, an MVC specification entered the Java Enterprise application realm, which is one of the reasons this book was born. It does not describe all MVC Frameworks that you can add to Java EE/Jakarta EE as an external library. There are just too many of them and you can learn about them by looking at each librarys documentation. Instead, we talk about the genuine Java MVC library as described by JSR-371.

The target version of Java MVC is 1.0, and we use a Jakarta EE version 8.0 compliant server to run Java MVC on it.

The book is for beginning or advanced enterprise software developers with knowledge of Java Standard Edition version 8 or later and some experience in Jakarta EE (or JEE) development. It is also assumed that the reader is able to use the online API references, as this book is not a reference in the sense that all API classes and methods are listed. Instead, it presents techniques and technologies that help professional Java Enterprise level developers leverage web application programming by including Java MVC in their software.

The book uses the Linux operating system as the development platform, although the code can be run on other platforms (Windows and macOS) without complex adaptions. This book also does not talk about hardware issues (in case you dont use a laptop, a PC, or a server).

The readers will in the end be able to develop and run Java MVC programs of mid- to high-level complexity.

All sources shown or referred to in this book can be accessed via the Download Source Code button located at www.apress.com/9781484262795 .

You can read this book sequentially from the beginning to the end, or you can read chapters on an ad hoc basis if your work demands special attention on a certain topic.