A Framework Based Approach for the Development of Web Based Applications

Rachit Mohan Garg, YaminiSood, Balaji Kottana, Pallavi Totlani Department of Computer Science & Engineering,
Jaypee University of Information Technology, Waknaghat, Solan, H.P, India {rachit.mohan.garg, eryaminisood, bala1205, pallavi.totlani}@gmail.com

Abstract— The sole goal of E-Governance is to allow interaction of government with their citizens in a comfortable & transparent manner. Uniqueness of J2EE makes it a perfect technology for development of any online portal. These involve constancy, easy to replant, construct speedily etc. In this paper we present a procedural approach to develop a web application using the J2EE Struts Framework.

Keywords- Web application; E-Governance; Struts; Frameworks; J2EE.

I. INTRODUCTION J2EE is the current field of research as it provides new advancement to the field of web application development framework. Various open source framework which are used for web application development. With the development of technology and communication technology, government wants to modernize their working. E-Governance portal can be used to provide services and important information to citizens through internet, it changes the way of working of government which are operated from traditional approaches to an advanced and more efficient operations. The major advantages of adapting E-Governance / E-Business portal to any government are: removal of location and availability restrictions, reduction of time and money spent, heightening customer services and the provision of competitive advantages [1]-[2]. E-Governance offers a new way forward, helping improve government processes, connect citizens and build interactions with a civil society. Currently, number of technologies has been developed for constructing E-portal, like ASP.NET and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition). J2EE is independent of a platform, that’s why more and more e-portal adopts this technology. There are many Open Source Frameworks which are based on J2EE technology such as Struts [3], webwork, jsf, echo, Spring [4], real methods, keel, Hibernate [5] and so on. Each framework has its own characteristics, therefore this paper present one web application which is made by Struts Framework [3]. II. STRUTS FRAMEWORK FOR WEB APPLICATIONS This paper has taken an example of E-Governance [1] named “Records Collection for India” portal based on above framework. Records Collection for India (RCI) maintains and groups together information from various public services departments that come under the preview of collector’s office namely, schools, hospitals etc. Conventionally, the citizen has to go to collector’s office in person to get issued certificates like for community, birth, income and driving license etc. This results in wastage of time. Here we provide the online registration facility to apply for various documentation certificates for the citizens so that the public in general has to visit the collector’s office only once at the time of submitting relevant documentary proofs or where physical presence is mandatory. This E-Governance portal has various functionalities. In this section we discuss only login approach which is used by Struts Framework. For this approach, following we require some files namely  Login,jsp  Success.jsp  Faliure.jsp  Web.xml  Struts-config.xml  LoginAction.java  LoginForm.java  ApplicationResource.properties A. Web.xml For any web application we need to define web.xml file. This file describe first page of that application. This configuration should be done in this as shown fig 1.
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Fig. 1 web.xml file. B. Login.jsp This page provide user interface for login page. In this page Struts HTML Tags are used for developing user interface. In our application, the login page has one text field to retrieve user name and one password field to get password. And form also contain one submit button, login action class is called when this submit button is clicked. <html: errors /> tag is used to display the error message to user. The login file of our application is shown in fig 2.

Fig. 2 Login.jsp C. Struts-config.xml After submitting the form of Login.jsp page, validate method of LoginForm class is called. If there is any error, like username is missing or password is missing, then control is returned back to the input page where errors are displayed to the user. This complete operation is configured in the action tag of struts-config file. In this web application, “/Login” is action, the input page is “login.jsp” and the corresponding action class is LoginAction.java. The validate method is described in the LoginForm.java file. D. LoginForm.java This java file contains v