[ potentially controversial topic ] Hi all, I have noticed that most of my Struts applications end up being implemented like dismembered objects.
I design the controller parts of my Struts applications using object-oriented design techniques, but then I have to transform my designs into an awkward, non-object-oriented form:
* What was originally encapsulated object state has to be extracted and isolated as ActionForms.
* What were originally methods that acted on encapsulated object state have to become stateless processors in the form of Actions.
* The Struts servlet acts like another method-turned-C-function when it resets and assigns property-values in the ActionForms.
I can translate in the other direction too. If I take someone else's Struts application, I can derive an effective object model from the relationships between the Actions and ActionForms described in the struts-config.xml file. That's really useful for figuring out what's going on.
There's no problem getting all of this to work, and the Struts servlet and framework do some very useful things. But the separation of the Actions from the ActionForms makes it harder to maintain the integrity of the original object-oriented designs.
What I'd really like to see is a truly object-oriented approach to the controller, where the state of the web-application is encapsulated as instances of real classes (not just the equivalent of C struts) that are acted on by methods. The methods would be invoked just like Actions are currently invoked, but rather than pass behavior-less data to data-less functions, we could have methods acting on encapsulated object state. Who knows - maybe someday we could even have subclasses and inheritance and constructors and methods with method parameters.
If action-mappings could map to methods invoked on named instances, Actions and ActionForms could be merged into real objects, and the object-oriented character of controller designs could be maintained.
Is there any compelling reason that this shouldn't be done?
I can get the object-oriented behavior I want using JPlates, but I don't want to have to duplicate all of the other contributions that Struts offers for web-applications. I use JPlates with Struts, but I'd be happier with a more object-oriented version of Struts.
Dan Jacobs JPlates Inc. http://www.jplates.com
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