On Sat, 16 Jun 2001, Jonathan wrote:
> Hello all.
> It seems that there is a back log of documentation to do and I would like to
> offer to help with it as I am very good at explaining things. It also helps
> me understand the framework in a deeper way. However, because I am still
> relatively green with Struts (3 months) I will need to correspond with some
> of you outside of the list to get questions answered (I dont want to clutter
> up the list with these questions). I can complete sections according to
> when you want them, or I can do it in the order I want.
>
Sounds great! This is a good place to talk about what the docs should
include.
On my personal wish list:
* High-quality UML diagrams covering all aspects of the architecture
of Struts (especially sequence diagrams of how requests are handled).
Anybody know some good+cheap tools for this purpose?
* Tutorials (and example webapps) for a few common design idioms, such as
a wizard-type multipage dialog. Although, maybe we ought to wait on
this particular one if we're going to add pager-type tags.
* Examples of extending the controller servlet to initialize your own
application resources.
* Examples that integrate some other commonly available tag libraries
(such as those in jakarta-taglibs). However, I'm not personally a
huge fan of using the DB tags, because it can encourage you to stray
away from MVC :-).
* Step-by-step how to construct a web app. Yes, this covers a lot of
ground that is not Struts-specific, but this would clear up a lot of the
complexity faced by new developers. A good starting point might be the
"Application Developer's Guide" that ships with Tomcat (disclaimer: I
wrote it, so don't be too hard on me :-).
* Completed "package.html" files for the remaining packages (used as
Developer's Guide links in the documentation).
* A comprehensive example that uses Data Acess Objects to talk to a
relational database. Ted's got some good starts here, but I'm thinking
more about a "real" application -- perhaps something like the
FAQ-O-MATIC idea, but written based on Struts?
* A comprehensive example that uses EJBs to delegate business logic to
session beans, and persistence logic to entity beans. Obviously not
everyone will be able to run this, but you can at least look and see
how such an app could be constructed.
A couple of things to think about before we start writing docs that will
be out of date quickly:
* I'm planning to migrate to jakarta-commons versions of the shareable
pieces of Struts that have migrated there, including: Bean Utils,
Digester, DBCP (connection pool), Collections classes, and Message
Resources. Docs are still welcome in all of these areas, but they
should probably be done in jakarta-commons instead of here.
* The JSP Standard Tag Library will have an early access version of their
tags available in the near future. There will be some significant
overlap with our tags in the struts-bean and struts-logic libraries,
and an expression language for nested property access that will be
similar to (but not identical) to ours. We'll want to think in the
long run about making sure that Struts interoperates nicely with
these tags. Because they will be standard, JSP page compilers will
be able to generate optimized code for them.
* A little further down the pike, the result of the JavaServer Faces
(JSR-127) effort to create a standard GUI Component Model for web apps
will be in early access. At that time, I'll want to build some app
examples that use JSF as the user interface, but interact with the
rest of the Struts framework. NOTE: I am on the expert group for
JSR-127, so you can rest assured that the two technologies will play
together nicely!
> If this is ok with you all and you are interested, please send me an email
> at mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Let us all salute the Sixers on their valiant effort last night
>
>
I was rooting for them (being from Portland and a Trail Blazers fan, you
can imagine how I feel about the Lakers :-). Alas, it was a tremendous
effort, but for naught ;-(.
Craig
