Thanks for taking the time to compose this e-mail - I'll send you my slides after I deliver the presentation. Other comments are below.
On Mar 7, 2004, at 6:25 PM, Scott Sayles wrote:
Hey Matt,
Sorry I didn't get back to you right away. I guess you're a bit anxious! ;-)
Well, I was working at an IT department for some company back in the
latter part of 2000. They wanted to start creating a set of internal
applications that would share a common interface. They had different
users set up in their database with certain roles. Each particular role
made use of certain applications. For each application, there was some
kind of menu. Because the definition of these menus were flexible, and
I hated having to muck around with the javascript menu libraries (which
also had the potential to change), I just thought it would be nice to
model the menus and have something render it howerver I wanted. I
created a simple initial implementation that did the job. Struts was
still in it's pre 0.5 days and I started getting familiar with it at
that time. The web app I was creating used Struts so I figured, what
the hey, I'll make it integrated with Struts. I didn't get that far
with it when I left the company after 3 months. This was still back in
the days of the IT job boom :-p. I ended up working for my current
company and started implementing a proof of concept web application that
was modeled after an existing swing based application that I wanted to
emulate some of the menus. From there, I decided I would try to make
StrutsMenu something I would host on sourceforge and attempt to
contribute to Struts. That was the initial version that I sent to Ted
Husted sometime in 2001. It didn't get much farther because I didn't
have any immediate need for it, howerver, by this time it was listed on
the Struts site as a contributor extension and I started getting emails
from people about it. I had intentions for imporving it and
refactoring/rewriting but never got around to doing anything until Vic
Cekvenich contacted me with a consulting opportunity. From there, I
added support for permissions and more dynamic menus. We started musing
about some grander ideas for StrutsMenu, but it never really panned out
and it sat for while again. Then, of course, you came along and started
making active contributions. And here we are! :)
There were a lot of other things that I wanted to do with StrutsMenu. I
started it in my earlier days of Java and I think some of the design
shows that. I really would have liked to have rewritten it. I haven't
even looked at it lately. I wouldn't be surprised if you already have!
:-p There were a few additional things in particular that I wanted to
accomplish with it:
I did a fair amount of enhancements for 2.0. The major piece was adding a VelocityDisplayer that allows menus to defined with Velocity templates. This is pretty big IMO because there's not much of a need to create new displayers - just new templates. I also added support for JSTL's expression language in the location, page, etc. attributes. This allows users to put in dynamic parameters that get populated at run-time. I plan on making all attributes EL-enabled sometime this week.
1) allow users to define the menus within the jsp page itself - it's a bit cumborsome to have to maintain a separate file for defining your menus. It would be more intuitive to maintin the menu definitions in the view itself.
How did you envision doing this - with Scriplets? I hope to whip up a "build a menu from a database example" this week. I'm going to try to do it all with JSTL tags - so maybe that will allow for this.
2) accommodate session based menus to make it easier to modify the menus
for the particular user
The current code does a pageContext.findAttribute when looking for menus - so this is supported.
3) Implement some kind of JSF comoponents for the menus
I don't know if there's a lot of motivation for this right now. JSF supports JSP - so Struts Menu should work fine. I'd vote to wait and see what the community things. I do plan on making Struts Menu struts-agnostic so it can be used with other frameworks.
Thanks!
Matt
Let me know if you liked to know anything else.
Scott
(http://www.basebeans.com/do/website). I'd like to start off the-----Original Message----- From: Matt Raible [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 3:40 PM To: 'Scott Sayles' Subject: Struts Menu's History?
Scott,
As you already know, I've been asked to give a presentation on Struts Menu at a conference in NYC in April
presentation with some history about Struts Menu, how it started, why
you created it, etc. If possible, please send me a paragraph or so
explaining the history, your original goals and anything else you'd like
to add.
Thanks!
Matt
------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ struts-menu-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sf.net/lists/listinfo/struts-menu-devel
