<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<chapter id="introduction" xreflabel="introduction">
    <?dbhtml filename="introduction.html"?>

    <title>Introduction</title>
    <para>
            The &quot;Photo Album&quot; web application is a desktop-like on-line photo manager. 
            It provides social services for  uploading photos, storing and previewing them, 
            creating your own albums and sharing them with other users, searching albums, 
            photos or users, managing the environment. 
            Newcomers or not registered users can navigate through other users' shelves and albums 
            in &quot;Anonymous mode&quot;, but in this case no possibilities to create personal 
            shelves or albums or upload photos are available.
    </para>
    <para>
            The &quot;Photo Album&quot;  represents and implements strict  &quot;Shelves - Albums - Photos&quot; hierarchy. 
            It means that photos are kept in albums and albums are stored on shelves, but albums can not contain another albums 
            or shelves and shelves can not keep another shelves and can not be stored in albums.
    </para>
    <para>
    	The Photo Album web application is designed and developed with RichFaces. This application demonstrates:
    </para>
    <itemizedlist>
            <listitem>
            	<para>
            		<emphasis>wide variety of UI components</emphasis> - the <property>RichFaces</property> provides 
            		a Lego-like way of building user interfaces for web applications;
            	</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
            	<para>
            		<emphasis>Built-in Ajax capability</emphasis> - the <property>RichFaces</property> offers 
            		both component-wide and very flexible page-wide Ajax support with no need to write any JavaScript code; 
            	</para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
            	<para>
            		<emphasis>Highly customizable look-and-feel</emphasis> - the <property>RichFaces</property> have special feature called 
                  	<ulink url="http://www.jboss.org/file-access/default/members/jbossrichfaces/freezone/docs/devguide/en/html/ArchitectureOverview.html#Skinnability">Skinnability</ulink>.
                </para>
            </listitem>
      </itemizedlist>
      <para>
      	The Photo Album application also encompasses technologies and frameworks such as:
      </para>
            <itemizedlist>
                  <listitem>
                  	<para>
                  		<ulink url="https://facelets.dev.java.net/">Facelets</ulink>
                  	</para>
                  </listitem>
                  <listitem>
                  	<para>
                  		<ulink url="http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/">Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0</ulink> 
                  	</para>
                  </listitem>
                  <listitem>
                  	<para>
                  		<ulink url="http://seamframework.org/">Seam framework</ulink> 
                  	</para>
                  </listitem>
            </itemizedlist>        
      <para>
      	The application is available online at <ulink url="http://livedemo.exadel.com/photoalbum/">Photo Album</ulink> page. 
      </para>
      
</chapter>

     
