CulturarteWeb Three-Tier Architecture

CulturarteWeb is structured around a classic three-tier architecture. The Presentation Layer consists of Jakarta EE Servlets and JSP views running inside Tomcat 10.1, responsible for handling all HTTP interactions with the browser. The Business Logic Layer lives entirely inside an external SOAP service — ControllerWS — which the web layer calls via JAX-WS for every meaningful operation (login, proposals, collaborations, PDF generation, and more). The Data Layer is a MySQL 8 database managed through JPA/EclipseLink, seeded from copia.sql on first boot. All three tiers communicate through well-defined contracts: HTTP/HTML for the browser, SOAP over HTTP for the business service, and JDBC/JPA for the database.

Presentation Layer

The presentation layer is built on the Jakarta EE 10 Servlet API (web-app version 6.0). Each feature area maps to a dedicated HttpServlet registered with @WebServlet, and JSP files in src/main/webapp/ render the HTML responses. Servlets include:

Servlet	URL Pattern	Responsibility
`BuscadorPropuestas`	`/Buscador`	Welcome page; proposal search (configured as `<welcome-file>` in `web.xml`)
`Login`	`/Login`	Authenticates users via ControllerWS; enforces mobile restriction for Proponentes
`Registro`	`/Registro`	Registers new users
`AltaPropuesta`	`/AltaPropuesta`	Creates a new cultural event proposal
`Colaboraciones`	`/Colaboraciones`	Lists collaborations for a proposal
`GenerarConstancia`	`/GenerarConstancia`	Requests a PDF certificate from ControllerWS and streams it to the browser
`TrelloApi`	`/TrelloApi`	Exports a Proponente’s proposals and collaborations to a Trello board
`PerfilUsuario`	`/PerfilUsuario`	Displays user profile data
`RankUsuario`	`/RankUsuario`	Shows the user activity ranking
`Seguidores` / `Seguir` / `DejarDeSeguir`	`/Seguidores`, `/Seguir`, `/DejarDeSeguir`	Social follow/unfollow actions

Front-end stack:

Bootstrap 5 — responsive grid and UI components (CSS files bundled locally in cssBootstrap/)
Vanilla JavaScript — client-side interaction scripts in src/main/webapp/JS/ (e.g., favourite toggling, follow/unfollow, form validation, payment pop-ups)
Custom CSS — CssPersonalizado/Styles.css and CssPersonalizado/propuestas.css

Session management: Sessions are container-managed by Tomcat. The web.xml sets a session timeout of 30 minutes:

<session-config>
    <session-timeout>
        30
    </session-timeout>
</session-config>

On successful login, the Login servlet stores two session attributes — logueado (the user’s nickname) and tipoUser ("Proponente" or "Colaborador") — which are read throughout the JSP views to control access and rendered content.

Mobile restriction for Proponentes: The Login servlet checks the User-Agent request header on every login attempt. If the header contains Mobi, Android, iPhone, iPad, or Touch, and the authenticated user is a Proponente, the login is denied with the message “Acceso denegado: Los Proponentes no pueden iniciar sesión desde dispositivos móviles.” Colaboradores have no device restriction. A complementary client-side script (detectarDispositivo.js) also redirects unauthenticated mobile visitors to the login/registration page.

Business Logic Layer

All business logic is delegated to ControllerWS, an external SOAP web service. The web layer contains no business rules of its own — it constructs a JAX-WS client proxy at runtime using the endpoint URL assembled from config.properties, then calls service methods directly. SOAP endpoint construction:

String dir = "http://" + host + ":" + port + serv + "?wsdl";
URI uri = URI.create(dir);
URL url = uri.toURL();
ControllerWS_Service service = new ControllerWS_Service(url);
ControllerWS portU = service.getControllerWSPort();

Where host, port, and serv come from config.getProps("WEB_SERVICES_HOST"), config.getProps("WEB_SERVICES_PORT"), and config.getProps("SERVICE") respectively. With default values this resolves to:

http://localhost:9125/controllerWS?wsdl

WSDL stub classes are generated at build time by the jaxws-maven-plugin (wsimport goal, generate-sources phase) from the live WSDL URL — meaning the SOAP service must be running when mvn clean install is executed. REST endpoint for Proponente profile data: An optional REST service provides Proponente profile information (including created proposals and their collaborations). The TrelloApi servlet and the front-end datosProponente.js script call this endpoint to retrieve a Proponente’s data by nickname:

http://{WEB_SERVICES_HOSTR}:{WEB_SERVICES_PORTR}/proponentes/{nick}

With default config values this resolves to:

http://localhost:9126/proponentes/{nick}

Data Layer

The database layer uses MySQL 8 managed by JPA 3.0 / EclipseLink (the default JPA provider for Jakarta EE 10). The persistence unit is declared in src/main/resources/META-INF/persistence.xml:

<persistence version="3.0"
  xmlns="https://jakarta.ee/xml/ns/persistence">
  <persistence-unit name="my_persistence_unit">
  </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

In the Docker Compose deployment, the database container is configured with:

Setting	Value
Image	`mysql:8.0.17`
Database name	`Culturarte`
User	`tecnologo`
Password	`tecnologo`
Root password	`tecnologo`
Host port	`3307` (maps to internal `3306`)
Seed file	`copia.sql` (mounted at `/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/copia.sql`)
Persistence	Named volume `db_data` at `/var/lib/mysql`

The copia.sql seed file is automatically executed by the MySQL container on first startup, initializing all tables and loading sample data.

Configuration

The config class (package Config) is a thread-safe singleton that loads ~/.Culturarte/config.properties at application startup.

// Singleton access
config conf = config.getInstance();
String host = conf.getProps("WEB_SERVICES_HOST");

Bootstrap behaviour:

On first instantiation, config checks for the directory ~/.Culturarte/.
If the directory does not exist, it is created via configDir.mkdirs().
If the file ~/.Culturarte/config.properties does not exist, the bundled default config.properties (from the WAR classpath at src/main/resources/config.properties) is automatically copied there.
The Properties object is then loaded from the external file, so any user edits to ~/.Culturarte/config.properties are picked up on the next application restart without repackaging the WAR.

The Maven build also reads the same file during the initialize phase (via the properties-maven-plugin) so that WEB_SERVICES_HOST and WEB_SERVICES_PORT are available as properties for the wsimport WSDL URL.

Trello Integration

The Trello API integration uses the Unirest HTTP client (v3.13.11) to make POST requests to the Trello REST API. The TrelloApi servlet first calls the REST service to retrieve a Proponente’s proposals, then performs the following Trello operations in sequence:

Create a board — POST https://api.trello.com/1/boards/ — named "Propuestas de {nickname}".
Create a list per proposal — POST https://api.trello.com/1/lists — named with the proposal title and publication date.
Attach the proposal image (if present) — POST https://api.trello.com/1/cards/{id}/attachments — the image is decoded from Base64, written to a temp file, and uploaded as a multipart attachment.
Create a card per collaborator — POST https://api.trello.com/1/cards — the card name is the collaborator’s nickname; the description contains the amount, return type, and collaboration date.

Trello API credentials (API_KEY and API_TOKEN) must be set in config.properties for this feature to work.

Key Dependencies

Dependency	Version	Purpose
`jakarta.jakartaee-api`	10.0.0	Servlet API, JPA, CDI, and all Jakarta EE 10 specifications (provided scope — supplied by Tomcat 10.1)
`com.sun.xml.ws` · `jaxws-rt` (Metro)	4.0.2	JAX-WS runtime for consuming the ControllerWS SOAP service; compatible with Java 21
`com.google.code.gson` · `gson`	2.10.1	JSON parsing for the Trello API and REST service responses
`com.konghq` · `unirest-java`	3.13.11	HTTP client used by `TrelloApi` to make multipart and JSON requests to the Trello REST API

Get Started

Deployment

Features

Database

CulturarteWeb Three-Tier Architecture

Presentation Layer

Business Logic Layer

Data Layer

Configuration

Trello Integration

Key Dependencies

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get Started

Deployment

Features

Database

Documentation Index

​Presentation Layer

​Business Logic Layer

​Data Layer

​Configuration

​Trello Integration

​Key Dependencies

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Presentation Layer

Business Logic Layer

Data Layer

Configuration

Trello Integration

Key Dependencies