Quoting Don Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > What if we extracted the creation of Actions and ActionForms (including > DynaActionForms) into an ActionFactory, overridable by the user? >
The idea of factories for all Struts objects is an appealing one (I don't buy the "too hard to teach" assertion either -- if you don't like teaching it, go tell the GoF that they've got things all wrong :-). The idea of a single factory for all of them isn't quite so appealing -- every time we want to add a new Struts API object, we need to go back and modify the standard factory class, which is messy. One interesting approach to this would be to add a responsibility to the existing set of FooConfig objects, adding an appropriate create method to each. After all, if you want a specialized type of Action or ActionForm object, you're probably going to need someplace to store extra configuration information also, and the config object is exactly where you'd want to add those properties. Instead of createDynaActionForm() and createDefaultActionForm(), then, we'd simply have createActionForm() on the FormBeanConfig class, and it would do the right thing. Using this approach, configuring a specialized config bean class automatically configures a new factory method as well, so you don't have to change two configuration settings in struts-config.xml either. An additional decision related to this whole condept, of course, is whether we stick with the pure JavaBeans style object creation (zero-args constructor, configure everything with property setters) or something like what Pico wants (everything configured by arguments to the constructor). I've dealt with enough tools vendors in the last couple of years to be convinced that the former (JavaBeans style) is *substantially* easier to build tools for, and would therefore favor continuing that design pattern for any kinds of objects (and object factories) that we create in the future. Craig McClanahan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
