classes and servlets .. oh my

[sde]

i'm trying to determine whether it is 'proper' to create servlets to interact with my jsp page, ... or if classes are just fine.

I'm working on a web interface so customers can access their information online. After several other technologies have either failed or just been too slow, we have decided to use Java.

I'm pretty happy we did, except I'm still trying to figure out the 'proper' way to do things.

Currently I have a couple classes. ( customer, phone, product as400 )

I've read a bit about the MVC concept and here is how I would break the different classes down.

customer and phone are just the data structure, or the ( Model ) and my as400 class is where I process the data. ( Controller ) Then of course the jsp pages are my View.

SOOOOOO.......

what is the proper way to do this? Should I make my as400 class into a servlet?

is it 'proper' the way i have it structured now?

usually the 'proper' way to do things is really open ended, but i seem to be coming across more rules as i read and work more with java.

any insight would be greatly appreciated.

thanks!

[Belisarius]

There's not a really good answer to that. Currently, I'm developing a J2EE site, and I'm only using JSP's.

The goal of a well-designed J2EE site is to seperate business logic from site layout, and maintain the MVC model. The problem many people have with JSP's are that it's just too convient to slip into doing business logic in them. So a variety of other technologies have been made that enforce boundaries more explicitly, such as Jakarta Struts, JavaServer Faces, and Jakarta Turbine/Velocity.

The way I have designed my site, in ad-hoc fashion, is to have 2 types of JSP's, one where something is displayed, and one which processes form data or performs some type of action. Anything involving business logic is initiated in the latter type, but the guts of it is performed in beans. For instance, I'll call an addUser(uid, pass) in a JSP, but the actual adding of a user to a database will occur in the bean.

A goal to strive for is that you should be able to give a quick training session to a web-coder so they can update the JSP as needed, but won't have to/be able to alter the business logic. If you move all that stuff over to servlets, you've ensured that some HTML monkey with a crash-course in JSP won't be able to screw things up. That's also why, despite the fact I don't use them personally, I think people should use JSP Tags instead of escaped code; it enforces the boundary between html monkey and code monkey.

[Belisarius]

Came across this interesting article that you might find enlightening:

http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/ymtd/ymtd.html

[sde]

thanks. currently i'm the only code monkey for this project, .. but i'm sure i'll be recruiting others as it grows .. so it looks like it's time to get over the escaped scripting style i am working with and get down to the beans.