Where Code and Content Meet: Design Patterns for Web Content Management and Delivery, Personalisation and User Participation

Chapter 3. Content Delivery

While the previous chapter was concerned with how content is managed and organised, this chapter is devoted to how it is brought to the web. We'll look at patterns for the server-side architecture for content delivery. We'll study what components are typically included in such an architecture and what the underlying principles are.

In many respects software for content delivery is similar to any other web application, so a variety of patterns apply that are targeted at web applications in general. The context of this book is more specific though, as we're not looking at web applications in general, but focusing on the kind of web applications that are necessary to make content available on the Internet. This chapter therefore deals with issues such as content retrieval, navigation and search functionality.

Before we start with the actual patterns, I'd like to revisit a fundamental principle of application development, as it's going to set the stage for the patterns to come. The Model-View-Controller pattern, well-known from the literature, divides an interactive application into three constituents. The model represents the data, the view implements possible visualisations and the controller handles user requests and interaction. The pattern recommends separating all model aspects from all view aspects and from all controller aspects. Due to a reduced coupling, there will be fewer dependencies and the system's comprehensibility and maintainability are improved ...