If you are designing an application such that the user must answer several questions on a page and there are dozens of pages. What Java libraries and tools do you use and are there any other recommendations that helped you to write such a site.
Requirements:
- User must be able to quit application at any time and return
- User must be able to navigate from start to finish based on previous questions
Possible Notes and Potential Issues:
– Use of Struts2+ or some other j2ee framework
– Possible use of spring core
– User of hibernate
– Oracle backend
-
Do you save to the database on each page?
-
Optional (use of JMS) to queue that a page has been completed.
Spring Webflow is good at this kind of thing and I’d use it in this situation since I’m already using it for other purposes. It might me a little heavy to pick up if you haven’t used it before and this is the only (immediate) use you have for it.
A “form” object in webflow can contain the data from multiple forms split across many pages, and each page fills in only a part of the whole object.
To quit and return any time you’d have to persist the form object at each page/transition. I’d lean toward saving it in the same table as finished forms but have a column for complete=false and a last activity timestamp.