Web Tier Technology and Practice – A Employee Manger Self-Service using a MVC framework

Abstract

With advances in network and browser technology, companies have been moving more and more of their corporate information resources to web based applications making them available to employees via the company intranet. EMSS (Employee Manager Self Service) is such a solution that enables employee’s access to corporate intranet or the Internet and enables employees to make changes on their own behalf.

On the demand of the customers from an international pharmacological company SPL, we build an integrated and comprehensive EMSS with emerging web tier programming technology and existing infrastructure -Zephyr

Zephyr provides a lightweight J2EE framework for the development and deployment of web-based applications. It is a Model-View-Controller pattern based framework, which enforces the separation between model and view to achieve flexibility and modularity. In addition, Zephyr leverage the powerful OR mapping tool Hibernate to provide transparent data persistence.

SPL EMSS is a good practice for Zephyr programming. From the development process, the power of the Zephyr framework has been fully exploited and accordingly it resulted in a rapid development cycle. However, it also shows some disadvantages of Zephyr, i.e. code maintenance and user interface. The possible solution is to combine the other mature frameworks i.e. struts and JSF with Zephyr to achieve the best of both worlds.