If you cannot view any URL and within twenty seconds find the JSP or controller code that was used to render that URL, there is a naming and UI architecture problem that needs to be addressed.
“Len was made team leader of the UI team. Although the rest of us were incredibly busy doing back-end code, we got warm fuzzy feelings that everything was under control in that department when we saw them all in the meeting room drawing lots of rectangles (screens) with arrows between them (navigation between screens). They even came up with a giant “navigation chart” which was a representation in Visio of what had been drawn on the whiteboards. The customer was so impressed by their complex diagram that they asked for a few copies to take to show the board. The busy diagram was an indicator of progress.
A month later I was watching Len and the customer discuss making a change to a field on one of the implemented screens on the computer in front of them. “I'll need to look at the JSP..”, Len said, puffed up with importance, “..but first I'll need to find it using my massive Visio diagram”. I started to get an uneasy feeling. It took him ten minutes.
Later we found out Len was put in charge of the UI architecture because his resume looked impressive and he had a nice face.”
By looking at a URL shown in the web browser, a developer should be able to directly identify the likely name and location in the source repository of:
the controller used to display that page
the form the page uses (if any)
the UI component (eg. JSP) used to render the URL.
The only part of the Model/View/Controller that should not be identified using the url is the Model - the business objects and rules engines that the application is based on.
