Daniel Fagerstrom schrieb:
A third possibility would be to make your "data" available as REST-style web services. Then the "view blocks" can access the data through servlet service protocol calls.
This is a great idea we want to implement in Mindquarry for quite some time (but other things need more attention...). Our sitemaps have grown quite large and it's hard to keep the bird's eye view. So our idea is to split up our sitemaps (we already have different sitemaps for each functional block of our application) each into a data sitemap and a presentation sitemap.
The data sitemap contains all the basic XML, Forms, flowscript processing, data fetching/storing etc. It provides a REST interface with XML content.
Then you put the presentation sitemap on top of it - it effectively contains various pipelines that transform the XML data into HTML or PDF for example.
The connection is done by the servlet protocol - so it's easily possible to let other HTTP/REST based-clients access the data sitemap directly - this gives you a very good API at no cost, because you have already designed it for you presentation layer and can simply reuse it by publishing it. It's also a classical separation of concerns.
Alex -- Alexander Klimetschek http://www.mindquarry.com
