Frank W. Zammetti wrote:
It's ironic to me that I had this same discussion with someone at work
just last week :)
I *was* in the "Maps are better" camp until a few months back when I
changed my mind, and it comes down to one thing:
Self-documenting code is better.
A bean is self-documenting in that you can immediately tell what its
attributes are and what types they are. I'm not even talking about
generating javadoc from the source either, but that's certainly a very
nice by-product.
Developers HATE documenting. I'm sure there are exceptions, but by
and large that is a very fair generalization in my experience. If you
trust a developer to document what is going into a Map, your asking
for trouble, generally-speaking.
I don't personally use an IDE, but I think Rick's point about
auto-completion and the like is important because many people *DO* use
IDEs, and if you give them a bean they can be more effective faster
than if you give them a map with some documentation on what they may
find in it at various points in time, and that's even assuming the
documentation is accurate :)
Especially in a team environment, I would always go with a real bean
now over a Map-based design, even though I agree with may of the
points made on why Maps are good. But in this world of trade-offs, I
think you gain more by using a bean than you do by using a Map, again,
generally-speaking.
Frank
I personally use map in early stages of development when the bean
properties (and their respective form properties) change very often.
This gives me flexibility to change easy and fast the jsp-s and to show
them to the end user (because most of the time they don't understand
abstract models, but they understand screens and forms). When we are
ready with such "prototyping" I reafactor the code and start to use
"normal" form beans and eventually the validator.
The other trade-off with mapped forms is that the errors you can catch
only runtime, which is not true if you use form beans.(excluding the
errors in jsp, unless you can pre-compile them before the deployment)
Btw, I'm evangelist about self-documenting code :-) .
Regards
Borislav
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