Web architecture: MVC, Lazy initialization, Data transfer Objects, Open Session In View, is there a consensus approach?

Question

What flaws do you see in the following design, (and what would be your ideal architecture suggestion) for a typical web 3-tier application?

My current blueprint appr

Answer 1

Your above approach sound good.

But I think you should use UI-Beans. Of course this UI-Bean should be effectively immutable. As soon as it is created its state (and the encapsulated domain object) should not be changed.

Very simplified example:

class UIBean {
  DomainObject o;

  public String getDescription(){
     return trimToSummaryText(o.getDescription());
  }

  private static String trimForSummaryText(){
     ....
  }
}

Main pros:

• Template code tends to get cleaner and consise. Your Frontend-Developer will be happy about this.
• You don't tend to add frontend-specific helper methods to domain object classes.
• Grouping of different domain objects or view-beans is possible (ui-bean could have multiple fields). Encapsulation of lists is especially nice here.

Yes, it involves more java-classes for that. But this abstraction layer is nearly always fine as soon as your webapp and pages grow.