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Showing web framework in diagrams

 
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Looking over the web framework included with the PetStore application, it seems that one of the features is that it frees the developer from writing code to navigate the remote interface between the web and EJB tiers.

In the conventional (non-framework oriented) examples of remote access to EJB beans, the EJB defining a remote interface, and the client looks up the specific bean's home interface, gets a reference to the specific bean, invokes its methods, and deals with remoting exceptions, etc.

What the WAF does for you (among other things) is to provide a generic remote interface used for the passing of EJB event objects and the return of EJB result objects. The user merely writes his event and result object subclasses and handlers; but the remoting code for passing requests and results between tiers remains generic.

This is all very nice, and as an architect I might say "We shall use such-and-such framework." But it seems to me that to detail the framework classes and the messages passed between them would be inappropriate use of my efforts. After all, the developers have better sources of information on how the framework operates.

But how do I show the interactions between J2EE components _without_ getting into the details of the framework classes? Should I say that the message-passing shown in my sequence diagrams is not to be taken literally -- that a business-oriented message in my sequence diagram might actually be implemented by a bunch of internal, framework-oriented operations that are not shown?
 
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I included Struts ActionServlet and action classes in my component and sequence diagrams, but made no effort to detail them. None of that showed up on my class diagrams. The execute() on the action classes is a given, but other than that I kept all on a really high-level. I lost 5 points on component diagrams, none on sequence or class. Don't really know if the level of detail on the framework classes was related. Probably it was my goofy depiction of JMS operation...
 
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Originally posted by Terry Mullett:
I included Struts ActionServlet and action classes in my component and sequence diagrams, but made no effort to detail them. None of that showed up on my class diagrams. The execute() on the action classes is a given, but other than that I kept all on a really high-level. I lost 5 points on component diagrams, none on sequence or class. Don't really know if the level of detail on the framework classes was related. Probably it was my goofy depiction of JMS operation...



Terry,
Did you show every action class which was used to process the request (like SearchAction, PriceFlightAction,SeatAction etc) or did you just show a generic Action class in your sequence diagram? Is it alrite to just mention with a note that 'appropriate Action class shall be mapped from struts-config.xml file to process the request' and just show one Action class ?

Parag
 
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I showed sequence diagrams originating from a generic "client" as the business logic in the backend is the same for both the Java application and the Web application.

I also used Struts, and showed a sample sequence diagram showing how a request is handled using the Struts framework (ActionServlet, RequestProcessor, ActionForm, Action class and so on).

I believe that showing every action class used to process the request would bloat the sequence diagrams.
 
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