Now that we've started applying the things we've learned to a real-world application, we're going to gradually ramp up the complexity of the projects we build. By designing and creating a code base that imitates something an actual customer might pay money for, we're not coding abstract examples that exist in isolation. We're building something that showcases some of the design decisions you will likely face as a software architect.

In this chapter, we'll build a monitoring dashboard that can be used to view metrics from an application server. Developers and system administrators will use applications like this to visualize the performance of their servers and monitor load at any given time.

Such an application could be used for internal monitoring, or it could be deployed as a Software as a Service (SaaS) that could be resold to other users. Either way, it will serve as a great demonstration of the power of view models; we'll be expanding what we...