How to Implement Dependencies in Server Pages of JEE Web Applications

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how dependencies are implemented in the web tier of JEE applications, focusing on communication mechanisms among Servlets, JSPs, JSFs, and JavaBeans, to facilitate dependency detection.

Contribution

It identifies various implementation methods of communication mechanisms in JEE web technologies and explains how these technologies access JavaBeans and Managed Beans.

Findings

Different JEE technologies use varied implementation methods for communication mechanisms.

The paper clarifies how Servlets, JSPs, and JSFs access JavaBeans and Managed Beans.

Dependency detection can be improved by understanding these implementation variations.

Abstract

Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) applications are implemented in terms of a set of components developed based on several JEE technologies includ- ing, but not limited to, Servlet, JSP, JSF, EJB, JavaBeans. These JEE technologies rely on a varied set of communication mechanisms to commu- nicate between each others. Examples of these communication mechanisms are HTTP requests, Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java DateBase Connectivity (JDBC), etc. These communication mechanisms represent program dependencies between JEE components. However, one communi- cation mechanism can be implemented following different implementation ways by different JEE technologies. Therefore, to be able to detect related dependencies, we identify these implementation ways used by a set of JEE technologies. In this technical report, we focus on the Web tier technologies that are Servlets, JSPs and JSFs. Also, we present how these technologies access the JavaBeans and Manage Beans components.