Our tutorial will be based on a simple web application that will start with few features and that will be extended later. The application will collect the user's personal data for a survey or site registration purposes and will show the collected data later.
To keep things simple the input data will not be persisted. Please note that data persistence through DIF can be accomplished with very little extra effort with a back end database running through Hibernate. DIF's own ORM Generator is able to generate all the needed code for you! Check out the TODO: Add link User Guide for more information on this subject.
The application will collect the user's name, age, sex and marital state. The name and sex will be strings (to be accurately, the sex is a character but later on we will see it's nice to think of it as a string). As for the age it will be a number, and the marital state will be a boolean (married or NOT-married).
Since we are developing a web application on a RAD framework, it might a good idea to structure the application's flow based on screens or pages. As such, our application will have a first page where the user data will be collected in an HTML form and a second page where the gathered input will be shown. The transition from the first page to the second will be made by pressing the usual "SUBMIT" button on the form.
Having defined the application goal and features it's time to move on!