Chapter 1.  Creating a Personal Web Portal (PWP)

This chapter is all about creating a robust and simple personal web portal that can serve as a personal web page, or a professional reference site, for anyone. Usually, these kinds of websites are used as mashups, or dashboards, of centralized sources of information describing an individual or group.

Technically, a personal web portal is a composition of web components like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, woven together to create a formal, simple or exquisite presentation of any content. It can be used, in its simplest form, as a personal portfolio or an enterprise form like an e-commerce content management system. Commercially, these portals are drafted and designed using the principles of the Rich-client platform or responsive web designs. In the industry, most companies suggest that clients try easy-to-use-tools like PHP frameworks (for example, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Drupal) and seldom advise using JEE-based portals.

Aside from the software processes and techniques that will be discussed in this chapter, the main goal is for the reader to have a quick but detailed review of the main recipe of Spring MVC 4.x implementation, and to know the importance of Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) concepts behind any Java Enterprise frameworks.

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

• Implement a complete Spring MVC framework
• Configure DispatcherServlet in a Spring MVC project
• Learn types of controllers and their current features
• Use controller annotations
• Map URLs to controllers
• Use different types of models in dispatching objects
• Validate form domain objects using Validator
• Convert and transform request parameter values into other object types
• Configure views
• Configure and implement e-mail transactions
• Deploy Spring MVC projects