Chapter 2. Introduction to the Case Study

Learning a new technology is often complicated by the fact that most sources of information tend to throw a lot of acronyms and new terms at you without providing any context. It's just as important to understand where and why to use a new technology as it is to understand how to use it. In this book we'll present most of the examples of how you use each technology in the context of a case study about a company developing a simple J2EE application for tracking hours spent on projects.
This sort of time tracking—for instance, consultants and legal firms track time spent on projects so that they can bill their hours—is common in many companies. Many other companies have in-house service groups (such as IT organizations) that must track time for internal billing purposes. What's more important, though, is that the example is complicated enough, both from a UI and a domain object perspective, to provide a backdrop complex enough to show you how to apply J2EE technologies in a real-world environment.