How to layout beans for single page design

Question

Hey guys. I'm designing a site that uses the Icefaces framework. I've been reading a book called Real World Java EE patterns. I'm kind of confused how to layout the pages. Normally I would have just a POJO class implement serializable for a bean. This bean would then back each page. With a single page design I'm going to have a bunch of elements on the page. Datatables, trees, inputs, calendars etc. Is it normal or best practice to have separate beans for each datatable, calendar, etc or put that all in one bean? I'm not sure how to approach this. Right now each element is a bean and I'm using the @Inject annotation to have the data table talk to the tree and vise versa. This creates really bad code and if I put this as a member of the class I will get a circular reference because the data table bean has to inject the calendar and the calendar has to inject the data table.
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

'best' practice is to not follow blindly what other people say, but to reason yourself what works best for you. It has been stated many times before and I will state it again: best practice does not exist. Only personal opinions about what is best exist. Personal opinions are not facts.
So choose what works for you. Is the code easy to maintain? Is it readable? Can you perhaps re-use parts of it? Then I'd say you have a winner.
I'll give you my personal favorite. When working with a page that has input elements, I tend to have two or three beans. Replace XXX with a logical and context sensitive name.
XXXForm - this is a simple request scoped bean that has the action and event methods and will hold some data for reading purposes for the view, possibly taken from a database.
XXXStorage - this is a session scoped bean that holds information from the form; if it is an editing function I initialize it with the current state first. Storing this stuff in a session bean makes it very easy to do Ajax stuff and create input cycles that span multiple requests. Also when data is split in multiple pages, the storage class is the one to remember which page is being displayed.
Optionally, I also have an XXXSearch object, which is a session scoped bean that stores search/sort/filter parameters. I make this session scoped so the information is remembered for the duration of the user's visit, meaning he can navigate away from the page in question, come back and all his choices will still be in place.
So no, I don't have beans specifically for each component, although I might make simple POJOs to hold information gathered from several sources (for example, information gathered from several database tables). These beans are generally used to fill the rows of a datatable and are just created from within the form class, for example in a @PostConstruct annotated method.