I am designing a web application obviously on MVC.

We are using Servlets, JSP not any frameworks as my team is relatively new to J2EE.

The only concern I have is whether to go for session bean/ DTO assembler as an interface between the controller and the business layer.

I need to transfer simple/complex DTO between the controller & DAOs. Also I have few transactions. Iam planning to go for static java classes for DAOs.

App. Server - JBoss.

Do give me your suggestions, performance issues.

Thanks.

Session bean is good enough if u are not really worried about having business delegates and all that. It is just so much better to use struts - it makes u do a lot of things right - forcefully. My experience is that using struts is always better than coming up with our own mvc framework. Depending on how much nesting u have in ur DTOs and how much data in the DTO is used in each usecase u can come up with either one DTO or custom DTOs. If u see that there are lot of custom dtos u need, then adding another layer to abstract out that is good - see EJB design patterns book in this website. Tells us almost all the answers.