I have been involed in architecting and writing web applications as long as there has been a "web". Recently, I have been doing due dilligence on web architectures. Most architectures recognize the value in the Model 2 (or MVC) approach in their design. But is this this sufficient?

This is a work in progress so excuse the mess and please check back for updates.

This article is geared towards enterprise web applications. An enterprise web application in the context of this article consists of the following:

• An application backed by some well defined business process.
• At least one developer per tier (JSP, Servlet and business process) with the ability to easily scale to multiple developers per tier without resource contention.
• There is a well defined development and release cycle. That is, development is not ad-hoc.

If your application does not fall under the above constraints then the concepts defined herein may not apply. For example, introducing Model 2 into an environment where there is only one developer may kill productivity due to the overhead associated with the multiple layers.

There are just as many starting points as there are web frameworks. Below is an attempt to enumerate a few of the initial conditions for a web-enabled application.

• Scratch. Nothing exists except a set of requirements.
• A business process exists that is exposed via a well-defined API. This API may or may not be tooled for the pecularities of a web application.
• An exsiting application that is to be web-enabled. Depending on the architecture of the application, this may fall into the case above. In a worst-case scenario the application is tightly coupled to a presentation mechanism (such as a monolithic VB app).

I was originally going to do a full write-up on the request / response, MVC, and the like but after re-reading Designing Enterprise Applications with the J2EE(TM) Platform, Second Edition and MVC Detailed it would be significantly redundant.

I will be updating this entry with more information using the above link as a reference.