Background

Understanding and building sophisticated Web applications is difficult. One of the biggest overall issues facing development teams is managing complexity. With each succeeding generation, our applications are becoming increasingly large and complex. In addition, these applications are taking on more mission-critical roles. All this underscores the need for good tools and processes that will make our teams more efficient and result in a higher quality of work.

A primary goal of the book is to demonstrate how teams can effectively leverage UML as a development tool for building Web applications, which in this context are software applications that manage business state and that have adopted a Web-centric presentation tier that relies heavily on standard Web technologies and standards, such as HTTP, HTML, Web browsers, and client-side scripting.

The WAE focused primarily on the presentation tier of modern Web applications. As a result, most of the discussions center on the shape and the nature of this tier, leaving detailed discussions of other tiersbusiness logic, entity, datato other books.

All the UML elements are managed in one Rational Rose 2002 model file. The top-level package diagram is shown in Figure B-1. The full UML model is not included in this appendix but can be downloaded, along with all the source code for the application, from the Addison-Wesley Web site at www.awl.com/cseng. The model is available in Rational Rose 2002 format (.mdl file).

Figure B-1. Top-level model and package summary