Our main goal is to start writing real code as fast as possible. Therefore, we keep the specification of the application we are going to develop as simple as possible.

Similar to the ubiquitous todo list applications^[1], we will write a simple program that stores memos – small notes that we want to remember.

Figure 1-1 is showing a screen shot of this application. There we have a text field labeled Add Memo where you can enter the description of the memo that should be stored.
After entering it, clicking the add button will create a new memo in the list below.

The list contains the description and the creation date for each memo. Furthermore, there is also a button labeled Reset list. Its purpose is to delete all entries in the list of memos.

There is a reason why we are using an application as simple as this: we want to introduce you to a lot of different technologies in this book by writing this app for each one of these. As the application is easy to write, we can quickly teach you the differences between each technology used. There’s also another benefit: as we are adding new technologies in the order they have been introduced first, you also get an idea of the historical changes of the Java EE standard.

One topic we are not covering though: we won’t persist the memos in a database. To simplify the code event further, we will just store the memos in the current user session. The standard for doing so is called JPA (Java Persistence API). As it is a rather big topic itself, we might cover it in a upcoming dedicated book.

That’s about it. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but you will see it will be enough to learn a lot about Java EE.

Now let’s start coding!

Fig. 1-1 Screenshot of our sample application

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