> > In can understand that struts might be to too complex to combine with > > mmbase. But I can imagine that adding a more "simple" framework, which has > > a basic set of features, would make the template design for a mmbase site > > much cleaner (without having to request a new mmbase tag for every > > functionality you need). I'm sure there's a java framework out there which > > could be useful. > > I those cases maybe the function framework can be what we are looking > for. maybe we nee to re implement the GOTO from scan so we can split > logic and display. > We might implement functionJumpers or something similar. For > developers who are new to MMBase there is a big chance they already > use some kind of framework and they probably are not willing to do > everything the mmbase way since that might take to long to learn and > will limit their code to mmbase based solutions.
When desiging Didactor 2, I noticed that creating such a complicated application does need some kind of framework. Eventually I decided to do most work just in MMBase taglibs, but to write a specific template for all business logic that was too complex for JSP. (I also used tree/leaf includes for a generic approach to including pieces of functionality). For instance, rating the answer a student gives for a question can be quite complex. What I did was create a 'di:rate' tag (or something like that, it's been quite a while ago since I was last involved with didactor), which calculated the score and created the corresponding MMBase objects. It just talked to the bridge, and was maybe only about 50 lines of code (writing taglibs is really easy!). Small effort, but made the JSP files far more readable. The great advantage of using taglib is that you still use the same technology; for somebody reading the source of the templates nothing new happens. Makes for quite well readable code. Johannes
