The CoreMedia CAE mainly comprises components from four sources:
A servlet container that hosts the application
The Spring Framework controls the application setup and main request control flow
The CoreMedia CAE Framework provides content access and handles caching and rendering
The Application is a custom implementation that typically provides custom request controllers, business logic, data view configuration for caching and templates that render the content.
The CoreMedia CAE strictly implements the MVC model for web applications:
The controller part accepts a request and – depending on the request URI – dispatches it to an appropriate handler bean that executes the request using the model. The result is passed to the view layer for presentation. The CoreMedia CAE comes with a number of basic handler classes that provide out-of-the-box content display functionality and an easy starting point for customizations. Spring MVC 3.1 is fully supported. See Section 4.3.1, “Handling Requests” for details.
The model part comprises business entities stored in the content repository enriched with business logic. The CoreMedia CAE provides a framework for mapping content objects to generated and/or customized classes. Third-party repositories can be integrated as well. Business objects can be cached in this layer. See Section 4.1, “Content Beans - Mapping content to objects” for details.
The view engine is responsible for rendering objects into a presentation format, typically HTML. The CoreMedia CAE provides a flexible framework for object oriented template selection through the ViewDispatcher. See Section 4.3.3, “Views” for details.