Chapter 8. Application Architecture and Design

Previous chapters in this book described different design considerations and motivations for Web services. They also described the various J2EE technologies used for implementing Web services and showed how developers might apply these technologies in an application. Where possible, the chapters offered guidelines for good design and highlighted the advantages and disadvantages among the technologies.

In this chapter, we illustrate how to apply these guidelines to the design and implementation of a real Web service application, the adventure builder enterprise. When architecting and designing Web service applications, you are faced with the significant challenge of constructing the various application modules so that they work together smoothly. We explain the motivational factors and issues that need to be considered, and make these issues concrete by showing how we came to the decisions we eventually made as we architected the adventure builder application. Through this examination, we hope to make it easier for you to determine how best to architect and design your own Web service applications.