Beginning Spring Framework 2

Chapter 6. Spring Web Flow

Web application page flow can become complex very easily, requiring you to have inside knowledge of an application's implementation just to understand the flow through the application. It is virtually guaranteed that anyone developing web applications will experience this problem at some point. By and large, the most common way to deal with page flow is to hard-code it into the application. However, hard-coding page flow is not a good idea for many reasons. The most important one is that understanding such a page flow requires a detailed comprehension of a web application's inner workings. Depending on the size of the web application and the complexity of its page flow, acquiring detailed knowledge of the architecture can be difficult and time-consuming. But what if you were able to capture all page flow details in a single location?

The business rules driving the design of applications can run the gamut from very simple to highly complex. But generally there are three types of web applications:

• Web applications that start out with a simple set of goals and remain simple: These applications are made to fulfill a small but meaningful need and never grow beyond that. Simple and to the point, these applications have no need of additional features.

• Web applications that start out with a simple set of goals and grow in complexity over time: These applications aren't originally designed to conquer a massive set of complex goals. They typically have simple beginnings, ...