First, thanks Vic for your feedback.
Second, right after I posted, I felt like I might have come across as insulting to people on this list with my web apps/browsers remark, especially considering that this IS a Struts list. I apologize if I offended anyone. I don't mean to undermine people's hard work. I agree with some of your points here, and I'll say it again, I do like Struts and have from the start. But I long to break free of the constraints of the browsers in doing interfaces. And in my opinion JavaScript should have become much more than it is by now -- it should be doing to/with IE and Netscape/Mozilla the types of things that JDNC can do as a baby.
I consider Struts to be a fine example of design patterns, refactorings, best practices, etc., put to good use, but it is not more than that. Struts to me didn't try to be more than it needed to be. It simply abstracted the 10-30% of what 90% of us (doing web apps) kept doing repeatedly but in different ways. The fact still remains that HTML-based applications are fundamentally flawed. HTML (and HTTP) were not designed with today's application requirements in mind. We are still just piggybacking applications on the Web, or with better designs, adapting them to the Web, which was designed for document (not logic) exchange. I hope for better architectures in layers 5, 6 and 7 (and who knows, maybe in the lower layers) in the future that, combined with better and better load balancing techniques, will change the landscape and how we think about Internet applications (in simpler terms, Internet doesn't have to equal Web). For example, imagine "browsing a page" that integrates stateful, stateless and streaming connection-based technologies like marked-up content rendering, instant messaging, multicast updates and streaming file exchanges. Maybe it also supports protocols better suited to proprietary LANs at the same time. Who wants to make the interfaces to all that happen in a proprietary Web browser? Maybe I'm too idealistic.
I think you and I are actually thinking along the same lines. I've been working on my own (albeit simple) "browsers" for a while. It's extremely rewarding. The application I'm currently spending most of my time on is a Swing client that is backed by a messaging server and (Servlet-based) applications running on an application server -- very similar to what you are suggesting. It doesn't forsake web apps, it just tries to forsake the limitations of the Web.
Erik
Daniel Perry wrote:
To me JDNC seems like a halfway house between webapps and rich client apps.
I personally like the way that webapps work (everything is written for the server and executed on the server then merely displayed at the client), but I hate the interface (html - and browser).
The web interface lacks consistency across browsers and (simple) rich gui components. It also lacks an event model (ok, so you can use javascript to catch events and fire off forms/etc - but this isn't very eloquent) - and lets face it, rich, clever apps need a gui event model.
I have been toying with the idea of an alternative browser - an application browser which is used to launch remote applications instead of an html browser.
Basically you have a browser which is designed to display GUI components (including custom gui components). User interfaces are specified (xml, or similar) and it loads them and displays them. It then processes events, and events can either be handled locally through a scripting language, or remotely through an event in the application code. The application code itself is running on a server. Applications are mainly event->action driven. Applications have read/write access the user interface. As a developer you just code the app and declare the gui. The user uses a standard bit of software to access the app.
Daniel.
-----Original Message----- From: Erik Weber [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 11 November 2004 15:20 To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: [OT] Re: A new paradigm of Struts development
Vic, why we would want to continue to write apps for Internet Explorer and Netscape after discovering a technology like this is beyond me. My chips are in with you. I have been pushing my web-app minded clients toward Swing all along, but technologies like Java Web Start and now JDNC are really going to strengthen my case.
I have a question for you. Sorry if the answer is obvious and I just haven't read enough.
I have invested a lot in writing custom UI classes, custom paint methods, custom UI defaults properties, etc., to get my Swing components looking the way I want (I'm sorry but, changing the background colors, and other easily-scriptable stuff, doesn't cure Swing's out-of-the-box ugliness). Also, I am amassing a collection of custom components, such as self-validating forms and custom JTextPane-based browsers.
In fact, one of my browsers builds layouts based on my own metalanguage (soon to be XML). It embeds diagrams with captions and draws arrows from the captions to the diagrams based on simple coordinates, etc. Seems like I was doing JDNC without even really knowing about JDNC. ;)
I do not intend to abandon my current set of GUI devices, but obviously I would like to leverage JDNC if it's worth it, not to mention provide compatibility. Will JDNC support my own look and feel (or pseudo look and feel)? Can it be easily modified to work with my custom components?
I'm not even sure if I should bring up the question of security. Suppose I have a custom file chooser. Will there be a sandbox concept like that of Applets?
Thanks, Erik
Vic wrote:
Adam Hardy wrote:
What I want to see in the future for big apps is a DTD or xml schema that brings JSP code and XHTML mark-up under control. Something that is easily editable by my editor of choice, using syntax-highlighting to show me where my XHTML is up the swanny.
Just in case you missed my posts about a great Sun open source project JDNC that will be a part of J26 Standard Edition (Mustang), it does above, one of the reasons that I am "raving" about it, check it out:
http://javadesktop.org/jdnc/0_5/docs/tutorial/index.html
And I am using it w/ a lot of success. Right now I am just doing the "Swing" extensions, but will tie in UI via XML (and will add code to make it work w/ Hessian SoA, it's trivial binding).
My chips are behind JDNC.
.V
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