JUnit Notes and Tutorial:

Home Page

Using JUnit With Eclipse IDE

JUnit FAQ (Has everything you need to undertand on Unit Tesing)

JUnit Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests

Documentation

Cooks Tour

JUnit Articles

MVC

Is MVC a pattern or framework ?

"MVC" is an "architectural pattern" which in turn can make use of several "design patterns", if needed.

A framework is an actual implementation of some sort, designed to be extended, adapted or customised as appropriate to the needs of your application.

what's the difference between design pattern and architectural pattern ?

- a Design Pattern is a solution to a rather localized problem - like "how can several classes share and customize a basic algorithm" -> Template Method.

- an Architectural Pattern is a solution to a rather global problem and therefore often more abstract than a Design Pattern - like "how can I shape the system, so that changes in the UI don't affect the model" -> MVC.

In J2EE, there are a lot of design patterns, like Session Facade, Value Object, etc...
Are these Architectural Patterns ?

No, those are Design Patterns - they are rather affecting a small number of objects instead of the whole architecture, afaik.

"MVC design pattern, MVC framework, MVC architecture"

Design Pattern - is a solution to a recurring software problem. It's a reusable solution. Tried and tested.

Architecture - is more abstract and is a way of looking at design. Every design has an architecture.

Framework - is an implementation of an architecture which consists of classes and interfaces that control the flow of execution of application that are based on a particular framework.

Example: Struts.

Down sides of MVC pattern.

Link - I

Link - II

Next Gen

AOP - Aspected Oriented Programming.
SOA - Service Oriented Architecture.
MDA - Model Driven Architecture.

High-Fyi

MVC Description

There really is no one to one relationship between model-, controller- and view-classes; their existence is driven by very different forces.

Your model classes are driven by the business rules you need to implement. The model needs to reflect your solution space in a way that it's easy to change and add new business rules without breaking the existing system.

Your view classes are driven by what you want to represent to the user. You can have views showing only specific details of a model object, another aggregating information from a whole bunch of different objects and anything in between. It's also wise to build up one view from several smaller view components to foster reusability and reduce duplicated effort.

And last but not least, your controller classes are driven by the way you want the user to interact with the system. A single controller might (or might not) be notified about user events from several views, notify several model classes about changes to make or actions to start and update information in views as it sees fit.

As you can see, there is no simple answer to your question. To make it even more complicated, MVC isn't the only, and also not necessarily the best architecture you can use. Popular alternatives are Model View Presenter and Document View, as well as combination and/or variations of the same.

Spring Framework

Spring Framework Home page.

Tutorial

Spring supports many types of view technologies off the shelf:
JSP, JSTL, Velocity, Xslt, Tiles, Excel through POI, PDF's through IText.

If you need a view technology that is not supported, it is not terribly difficult to roll your own.

Sun Certification Exam

Preparation site.