Java Server Pages

Online Shopping

Now let’s look at a more useful example: an online shopping site. Besides showing you how the session and application scopes can be used effectively in a larger application, this example also introduces many other useful tools. You’ll see a number of generic custom actions you can use in your own applications, and learn how to use the java.text.NumberFormat class to format numbers.

The application consists of three pages. The main page lists all available products. Each product is linked to a product description page, where the product can be added to the shopping cart. A product is added to the shopping cart by a request processing page. The main page with the product list is then displayed again, but now with the current contents of the shopping cart as well, as shown in Figure 8.6.

Figure 8-6. The product list and the contents of the shopping cart

Two beans are used to keep track of the products: the com.ora.jsp.beans.shopping.CatalogBean contains all available products, and the com.ora.jsp.beans.shopping.CartBean represents one user’s shopping cart. Each product in the catalog is represented by a ProductBean .

Tables Table 8.6, Table 8.7, and Table 8.8 show all the properties for the beans.

Table 8-6. Properties for com.ora.jsp.beans.shopping.CatalogBean

Property Name	Java Type	Access	Description
productList	com.ora.jsp.beans. shopping.ProductBean[]	read ...