DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A MVC-BASED ARCHITECTURE FOR E- COMMERCE APPLICATIONS

Though the separation of a model from its visual representation (view) im- plies well-known benefits, available Java libraries do not sufficiently support this con- cept. The paper presents a straightforward way to smoothly enhance Java libraries in this direction independently of the particular graphic user interface (GUI) library. The lean framework JGadgets, which was inspired by the Oberon Gadgets system (1), allows developers to focus on model programming only. This significantly reduces the devel- opment costs, in particular in the realm of quite simple, form-based GUIs which are common-place in commercial e-business-systems. We first present a small case study implemented on top of JGadgets which demon- strates the benefits of the MVC architecture. The paper then goes on to sketch the reflec- tion-based design of JGadgets itself.