Hi all,
I was wondering what your views on the following are:
JavaBeans seem to only allow fixed properties (say "foo" and "bar), and the
tags that operate on them (e.g. <bean:write>) essentially call getters
"getFoo()" and "getBar()". However, this means that any time we're in the
action class and we want to package some information to send to the JSP, we
need to write a Java class with the appropriate properties and getters. This
quickly becomes tiresome and causes code bloating; if I want to avoid
scriptlets in my JSP, I have to use Javabeans, so for pretty much every
Action class I need to add such a new Java class.
A better way would be for Javabeans to be (essentially) some sort of
subclass of java.util.Map, so that I can add properties at runtime. Here's
some sample code:
GenericJavabean jb = new GenericJavabean();
jb.addProperty("foo", "value of foo");
jb.addProperty("bar", "value of bar");
Then, there could be some other tag, say <bean:write2> whose "property"
attribute will not correspond to a getter function, but will instead call
(internally) bean.getProperty("foo").
In short, Javabeans, the current mechanism of passing information to the JSP
for display purposes, are limiting because they have to be defined at
*compile* time. It is not practical (in terms of efficiency and complexity)
to add getter functions to a class at runtime (we've considered that), so we
need to essentially create new Javabean classes.
Am I the only one who gets bothered by this? I was wondering what the rest
of you do. Do you just resign to creating new Java classes every time you
want to put something on the request and send it to the JSP?
thanks for your input,
Iraklis
