On 11/3/06, Gary VanMatre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>From: Thomas Walland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Hi, > > As I already wrote, I am a newby to apache shale. So I have a few > general questions. > > I have great experience with apache struts, but never made some work > with JSF or other technologies which are used in shale. > > So I need something like a short introduction in the style of "shale > f?uts users". > > I heard a lot about the prerenderer. Is this something like the > controller-classes in struts-tiles? A class or action which is called > just before the associated jsp or html file is rendered? >Yeap, once you try it, it is hard to imagine using JSF without it. The shale tiger library is a really nice add-on if you can use java 1.5. It allows you to use annotations to register managed beans. These beans are like the struts action and form bean combined with IoC. @Bean(name="mybean", scope=Scope.REQUEST) @View public class MyBean { @Prerender public void loadPeople() { ... ... } } > Until now I had only a look to the clay-usecases example which is > distributed on the shale-webpage. In this example, there is a > managed-bean defined (QueryParam) which puts some Request-Parameters > into the defined class. > That is like a struts form bean on steroids. In struts, the form bean was auto-magically populated from request parameters. Using the JSF managed bean facility, you can use dependency injection to connect graphs of objects, not just request params. > Can we say in general, that this is a rebuild of the functionality of > the Struts-Action's? > > Another question: Most question and mails on this list refer to jsp > functionality and problems with some jsp-errors. As I heard about > struts especially about clay, this was the most interesting point for > me. But it seems that not that much people are using clay at the > moment? > That just means that there is more opportunity to participate :-). Some of the best features in Clay have come from people in the community exchanging ideas on the mailing lists. > Are there some great disadvantages about this technology? I want to > realize a huge project with shale and also with clay. Is it a too > early stage to use clay? Is there some further developement work, > which should be done? >
We are using Shale/Clay for a huge portlet project. It's actually a pleasure to work with. You will start applying metadata to components, then you will realize you can build up the resuablitiy chain. You will piece together trees of components. Then you will realize you can encapsulate entire fragments of your application in modules. I wrote a wiki entry about this - check out http://wiki.apache.org/shale/ReusableClayJars. It's kind of a silly example but it shows you just how far you can go with it.
Hopefully there will always be new features and enhancements we can add but Clay is more stable than ever. The only way to make this happen is for the community to build under and around it. Clay started as simple idea and has grown with the ideas of people in the Shale community. > I hope my questions are clearly written. I am not so an experienced > english-writer. > > Thanks :-) > Thomas > Hope to see you hanging around. Gary > --- > Thomas Walland > http://www.walland.net > [EMAIL PROTECTED] >
