On Mon, February 14, 2005 11:12 am, Vic said: > And 10 years from now... have a declerative langage... where all you do > is write in xml what you want to happen.)
Although no one has any reason to believe that I actually was :) ... I've recently been toying with the idea of building exactly that. The other day I was in fact writing down the beginnings of an "Action Description Language" that would allow you to build what would be akin to ActionForms and Actions on-the-fly based on expressions in this language. In essence, the ENTIRE control layer gets turned into ADL expressions in some XML configuration file, the only actual Java code you would have to still write are the business delegate classes. In a lot of ways it's just an extension of what we have now by way of DynaActionForms, but brings the idea to the Actions themselves and allows for a degree of logic too. In fact, such an idea I believe could be added to Struts as it exists today... if you use something like BSF with Rhino, you should be able to make the expression language Javascript, and then you basically do away with Actions altogether in favor of executing pieces of Javascript pulled from a configuration file. Couple this with DynaActionForms, and you more or less have a completely declarative model bolted on to Struts! At least in theory :) The benefit is that you kind of force people to have cleaner separations... If creating Actions is declarative instead of programmatic, they have little choice but to treat them as flow control mechanisms. There wouldn't be any "eh, I'll just throw a little bit of logic here to make life easier" syndrome :) Then again, especially going the Javascript route, you could wind up with massively complex scripts and ungodly huge configuration files, not to mention the performance impact of executing script instead of bytecode. That's why I was going down the path of creating my own expression language. I could eliminate or at least minimize a lot of these negatives. Eh, but this is clearly off-topic for this thread. I thought it was an interesting thing to mention in light of your comment though Vic :) -- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
