Thank you so much for checking this out. I greatly appreciate both negative and positive feedback. I suppose I forgot to emphasize how out of date and incomplete this little reference was. It was assembled by plunking in comments as I read or hear them, without much in the way of maintenance. I see that opening it up to others is one very good way of weeding out obsolete remarks.
My initial intention was just to see if anyone knew of another more accurate and complete web development product reference like this. Since such an alternative hasn't come to my attention, I'll have to think about how to make this more complete, accurate and public. Mr Husted has graciously offered to host it on his site if not on the struts site itself.
You are absolutely right that the revision to ActionForm has eliminated the field redundancy. I've added this correction and your other comments to my collection.
My own framework is not even close to as good as struts, but I am using it because I had trouble getting struts to work with weblogic, and I was told that our Portal Server, Epicentric, doesn't work well with servlets, and because I was way behind schedule. Now that struts and weblogic get along well, I will try to use struts on my next project.
Thanks again,
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven D. Wilkinson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 7:48 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: which development tool to use?
Dan,
You still have the negative comment about Struts and weblogic. It would be nice
if you corrected that before doing whatever it is your going to do with this
massive thing.
====================================================================================================
I believe the "hack" was considered a work around, because WebLogic does not
support the servlet startup concept in their implementation of Servlet2.2 api.
FYI, there are a lot of commercial application servers that don't do a good job
implementing the Servlet2.2 api. My guess is that this will be the same with
Servlet2.3. So please use the term work around, because they don't support the
Servlet api. I know it's picky, but I think a "hack" brings negative
associations with 'struts'. IMHO, it's terms like 'hack' that cause people to
respond so negatively to 'struts' questions on the weblogic support news
groups.
Another criticism about you comparison. Under struts you put the following:
===========================================================================
-Requires a lot of redundancy per form field.
I disagree with this. Now that the JSP pages can use the dot operator you don't
have to expose attributes to the ActionForm implementation.
For example:
public class Registration extends ActionForm {
private User user = new User();
public User getUser() {
return user;
}
public void setUser(User user) {
this.user = user;
}
}
public final class User implements Serializable {
private String firstName = null;
private String lastName = null;
private String title = null;
private String userName = null;
private String password = null;
private String confirmPassword = null;
private String passwordHint = null;
private Address userAddress = new Address();
private Address billingAddress = new Address();
private String email = null;
... getters/and setter for each
}
And The address class has traditional address1, address2, etc.
Now in the JSP page you can do this:
<html:text property="user.userName" size="34" maxlength="30"/>
<html:text property="user.firstName" size="15" maxlength="25" />
<html:text property="user.lastName" size="17" maxlength="25" />
<html:text property="user.userAddress.address1" size="34" maxlength="50"/>
<html:text property="user.userAddress.address2" size="34" maxlength="50"/>
Now please show me where the redunancy is on the form page? I agree prior to
the new reflection and introspection logic within the util package, you did have
to have redundant stuff in the implemented ActionForm. Now that is not true.
Please correct this. It is negative on 'struts'.
BTW, I also observed positive you were in describing you own framework.
+Uses JSP as controller, so you don't have to restart the server all the time.
+Uses a StateManager class to abstract the problem of statelessness on the web.
+JSP's don't have to know which bean(s) their fields are bound to.
I take it your's doesn't have any negatives? Just kidding. I thought I read an
earlier message where you abandoned your effort to support struts. Is that
true?
I don't mean to pick on your document, but you did offer it to the mail list.
Since I'm such a strong supporter of 'struts' I just HAD to comment. Hope you
don't mind.
FYI, with JBuilder4 Professional Edition you have the ability to debug JSP
pages. Professional is in between Foundation and Enterprise.
Personally I use JBuilder4 for debugging. I was converted on my current
contract to JBuilder4. It is soo much better than JBuilder3 and 3.5.1. I never
could get with the interface on NetBeans or Forte. It seemed klunky to me.
However, I'm an old JBuilder3 user. I did have to abandon JBuilder3 because it
used to have extremely high disk activity. I have used vim since then until
now. JBuilder4 is really good and it is nice to have a Java based product have
such high marks. Another Java based product that I TRULY love is TogetherJ4.
This blows away Rational's offering. Did you know that you could generate a
sequence diagram automatically? Then did you know that you could change that to
a collaboration diagram and back? Truly awesome product. FYI, when I encounter
such wonderful Java based products I usually buy them. However, I do have my
own company otherwise the TogetherJ4 purchase would have been a little tough.
Anyway, thanks for your effort. What are you going to do with all this compiled
information?
Steve
