Introduction to the WAF Developer Guide

The Red Hat Web Application Framework is a platform for writing database-backed web applications in Sun's Java®. Applications leverage Web Application Framework APIs to enable the authoring of persistent structured data and to retrieve and display the data as content. The framework also integrates services such as search, versioning, and permissions into its basic objects, enabling applications to leverage framework services with little or no extra work.

The Web Application Framework domain layer models basic concepts such as users, groups, and permissions and has been proven and refined on hundreds of production deployments. A user interface (UI) framework, UI component library designed for the rapid development and reuse of web user interfaces, and a powerful object-relational persistence engine are also part of the framework.

Please enjoy this guide and report any bugs with the documentation to http://bugzilla.redhat.com/. Please report using the unique component name for this guide:

rhea-dg-waf-en(EN)-6.1-HTML-RHI (2004-03-29-T16:20-0800)

1. Assumptions About WAF Developers

This manual assumes that the reader is familiar with the Java programming language, HTML, and relational databases. Familiarity with the J2EE Servlet and JSP specifications, XML, and XSLT are also helpful. An understanding of the UML and basic object-relational mapping concepts will help the reader understand the persistence system. For more information, see Section 7.1 Developer Education.