In this first part of the book we summarize the web's foundations and show how to build a simple back-end web application using Java, JPA, JSF and the MySQL database. It shows how to build such an app with minimal effort. A back-end web app is a distributed web app where essentially all work is performed by the back-end component, including data validation and UI page creation, while the front-end only consists of a web browser's rendering of HTML-forms-based UI pages.
The minimal version of a Java back-end data management application discussed in this part only includes a minimum of the overall functionality required for a complete app. It takes care of only one object type ("books") and supports the four standard data management operations (Create/Read/Update/Delete), but it needs to be enhanced by styling the user interface with CSS rules, and by adding further important parts of the app's overall functionality.
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