Program Design issue: jsp?!?

[Andrew Tucker]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to design a maintenance schedule program. I was thinking that
the ideal way to do this would be to use jsp's and a web interface. My
question is ( i apologise in advance for any vagueness), I would like to
have a data structure of client objects, reminder objects and then iterate
through reminder to generate a schedule for a given day, how do i initialise
these objects on the web server? I was thinking that i could make the
objects serialisable and store them in a data file, and then activate
another program to load the data and then use the web interface to query the
objects. I obvoiusly want to avoid having to reload all the data every time
a query is submitted for a given day.

Am i barking up the wrong tree, should i just design a java gui that does
all this. I wanted the jsp thing so i didn't have to worry about printing
the schedule and it would be accessible from around the office!

Thankyou in advance for any direction you can give me,

Andrew.

 

[Roedy Green]

how do i initialise
these objects on the web server?

You use the static { } feature to initialise the class variables the
first time the class is used. As long as there is some reference to
the class, those objects will hang around indefinitely. They may tend
to get paged out to disk if they are not used, but they will be more
or less instantly ready. So long as there is room for them in virtual
RAM, there is no need to serialise them.

Other designs would put the data into SQL, and you do some query to
find the records to build the schedule. The advantage of this is
crash-proofness. The disadvantage is it more clumsy to program and it
is slower.

Another approach if you want these objects to persist between
incarnations is a POD. See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/pod.html