I recently downloaded IBATIS in order to use it for some object
persistence... interestingly, their JPetStore implementation used a similar
idea, although it was all struts based:
Essentially, each "method" you want to call is actually mapped within the
Action Mapping... so if you wanted to "searchProduct", then your mapping
could be:
<action path="/shop/searchProducts" type="com.ibatis.struts.BeanAction"
name="catalogBean" scope="session"
validate="false">
<forward name="success" path="/catalog/SearchProducts.jsp"/>
</action>
Where the CatalogBean has the required method (searchProducts)....
It seems pretty neat so far... haven't had much time to play though...
/A
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Zammetti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 2:29 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Theoretical debate
Last night I was Googling for something and I stumbled across the Crysalis
framework. I was actualyl intrigued by the underlying premise of it and I
wanted to see what others thought about it.
In a nutshell and in my own words, Crysalis
(http://chrysalis.sourceforge.net/) has the underlying idea that when you
develop in most MVC frameworks, Struts chief among them, you are actually
doing something unnatural and in a way at odds with basic OOP design.
Think about a shopping cart example... If you were going to write that in
straight Java, not for the web or anything, how would you model it? Most
likely you would have a ShoppingCart class with a number of methods in it,
things like addItem(), removeItem(), totalPrice(), etc.
In Struts, although you aren't FORCED to, what you GENERALLY do is create
three different Action classes like addItemAction, removeItemAction and
totalPriceAction, and each is called in response to a form submission.
But isn't it kind of odd that your object model isn't following what you
probably think in your head is the right way, i.e., one class with multiple
related methods? Proper encapsulation and all that jazz, right?
Well, Crysalis does just that. It's controller elements are regular Java
classes with multiple methods. What you wind up with is something that
resembles Remote Procedure Calls instead of numerous servlets as
controllers.
In other words, you would create the ShoppingCart object just as I described
above, with all three methods. Then, when you submit a form, the action is
something along the lines of "ShoppingCart.addItem.cmd". ShoppingCart is
the class to execute, addItem the method and cmd is a suffix to direct the
request, just like extensions in your Struts apps map requests to
ActionServlet.
The elements of the submitted form are treated as the parameters of the
method being called, making it rather elegant.
I haven't gotten into any real detail on Crysalis, but I was interested in
getting other peoples' thoughts on the underlying principal (which I *THINK*
I've stated properly!). It was rather interesting to me because I'd never
reall considered looking at it that way, and certainly it's not the way you
typically approach a Struts-based application. It was also interesting to
me because I've for about four years now been preaching here at work that we
should write our applications as a collection of services that are executed
to form a coherent larger application, which is very much along the lines of
this (so I guess I actually HAVE looked at it this way in a sense, but not
exactly).
Any thoughts?
Frank
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