Dave Johnson wrote:
On May 2, 2006, at 9:19 PM, Matt Raible wrote:
IMO, I think it'd be a better move to use WebWork (which also supports
Velocity) or rather, SAF 2.0. If/when we migrate from Struts to SAF
2.0 - we could leverage the same framework for both the editor and the
blog UI.
Coming from Matt "Spring Live / web framework sweet-spots [1]" Raible,
that's a telling statement.
Yeah, I value Matt's opinion highly, so it sounds like we should give
some consideration to WebWork.
I should note that the Patrick Lightbody, the WebWork representative in
Matt's paper answers the question "What type of scenarios does [WebWork]
not fit in to? Would you recommend another framework in this scenario?
If so, which one?" with "For a really simple application, I’d recommend
just plain JSP or perhaps Spring MVC if the users are comfortable with
Spring."
The blog UI is pretty simple (VelocityServlet has worked pretty well, it
seems), and JSP is ruled out, so we have a WebWork guy saying that the
"sweet spot" for our application is SpringMVC.
How serious are people about migrating the admin UI to a new framework?
Both the WebWork/Struts merger and SpringMVC are trying to provide a
migration path from "classic" Struts. Has anyone considered SpringMVC
for the admin UI?
Using the same Framework for both blog UI and admin UI sounds desirable,
but what if they have different "sweet spots"?
IMO, *if* we're going to use a framework
I don't think using a framework or not is a binary decision. There are
heavyweight and lightweight frameworks, and some frameworks (SpringMVC)
give you a choice of how much "weight" you want to adopt. I'm proposing
a very lightweight use of SpringMVC. My second choice would be stealing
some design patterns (or interfaces) from SpringMVC and not using a
framework at all. I can't rule out WebWork, though. I think we can
rule out things like Tapestry/JSF for the Blog UI component, though.
in the implementation of the
new URL stuff, we should definitely consider the Apache stuff. Why?
It
might be better than SpringMVC, it could help us avoid more framework
proliferation, it's Apache dog food and it might encourage contributors
from neighboring Apache Struts community (hi Ted!).
I'm a big Apache fan. Spring uses the Apache license and I wish it were
an actual ASF project, but that seems unlikely. However, I think there
is a big overlap between the Apache community and the Spring community.
Sean, have you taken a serious look at what's coming in Struts/Webwork?
I've taken a serious (but probably not long enough) look at WebWork, but
I haven't seen anything specific about what's coming with the
Struts/WebWork merger. Can someone provide information/links on this?
In looking at WebWork, it seemed to me that you are forced into much
more abstraction from HttpServletRequest etc. than we really need for
the blog UI and that it would be a much bigger change to the existing code.
It would be great if someone that knows WebWork (or SAF 2.0?) could take
a look at my proposal and provide some guidance into how WebWork/SAF2
could be used to do something similarly lightweight. If not, do we have
the resources (I'm willing to help, but will be of much less value) to
do a WebWork/SAF2 implementation of the blog UI?
-- Sean
