While I had been working in j2ee enterprise application, the SEO friendly url’s was never an objective. It was never required that each page should have a unique bookmarkable url.

But things change completely in world wide web world. SEO is hot . All the pages should have a unique user friendly url.

In Skill-Guru although we had unique url for the test pages, they were never user friendly. Our url’s were like

http://www.skill-guru.com/skill/login/getAllTestsByCategory.faces?cagtegoryId=1&cagtegoryName=Certification

http://www.skill-guru.com/skill/login/fetchRelatedTestsPosts.faces?tag=scjp

So we took the project of re architecting the application to have a clean , user friendly , bookmarkable url.  We looked at couple of options like url rewriting in .htaccess file on the server.

Then we discovered pretty faces.  Pretty faces utility has been written by Lincoln Baxter. This makes life so much easier for application developer . It also left the control with the developer to manage the url within the application instead of managing on server.

I am not going into details of pretty faces as Lincoln has done an excellent job on documentation. Now the url’s in our application are user freindly.

http://www.skill-guru.com/cat/sat-practice-test

http://www.skill-guru.com/test/79/passage-based-reading-test-1

Thanks to pretty faces we now have pretty URL’s.