title: What is the best approach to create a role based web application?
body: <p>I need to create a web application for a School and I need to have different roles such as:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Student</li>
  <li>Professor</li>
  <li>Admin</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I need to have a login at the beginning and then after entering the credentials the application needs to redirect to the home page. </p>
  
  <p>The question here is: How should I handle the roles? Should I have a namespace for each role? i.e: students/index.jsp, professors/index.jsp, admin/index.jsp or have a common namespace for all roles? something like home/index.jsp? and then use decorator/composite pattern to have the menus have different options based on the role?</p>
  
  <p>For this question I know that I must store the users and the roles, each on in it's own table, this question is more related abour handling presentation/navigation/permission roles and how to create the webapp structure, i.e have a directory under webapp folder called students, another folder admin, and another one students and about the point I mentioned above (decorator or composite pattern)</p>
  
  <p>Of course I am not making an app this small but I wanted to simplify the issues I am facing in order to create a big role web based application, and I believe these are the main principles.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you for your time and help. </p>