Welcome to the Virtual Realty application website. Virtual Realty is a fictitious company that sponsors an online "multiple listing service" for real estate brokers.
- Brokers can add listings for available properties to a common online database shared by many brokers. The application allows Web site visitors to browse all of these listings, no matter which broker's Web site they happened to be visiting.
- The page layout seen by visitors is co-branded according to which broker referred them to the site.
- If visitors want to see additional details about available listings, they can sign-up with the service as registered users. They can establish customer profiles specifying their individual preferences (e.g., rentals vs. purchases, houses vs. apartments, number of bedrooms/bathrooms desired, location).
This is the demo application described in Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols, and Practices by Leon Shklar and Rich Rosen, originally published by John Wiley & Sons in 2003, with a second edition released in 2009. It employs the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern using the popular Struts framework.
- The Model is a small set of JavaBeans persisted in a relational database:
CustomerProfiles,Listings, andPartners (brokers). - The View makes use of codeless Java Server Pages that use only
the core Java Standard Tag Library
(JSTL) tags
and the version of the Struts HTML taglib (
struts-html) that supports the use of JSP EL expressions. - The Controller is the
ActionServletclass distributed with the Struts framework. Thestruts-config.xmlconfiguration file provides the action mappings to direct requests to appropriate "actions" for processing. (This architecture employs two of Sun's Core J2EE Patterns: Front Controller and Service-To-Worker.)
The book also contains a second demo application, an administrative interface for the Virtual Realty web site, written in Ruby on Rails.
