CONNER, BRENDAN (SBCSI) wrote:
After having done several native MyFaces application implementations,
I'm just starting to do initial research into Shale. The motivation to
do this is that, from my understanding, Shale offers a framework
allowing relatively painless debugging of JSF actions.
I noticed on the site that Shale provides support for multi-screen
"conversations" via its Dialog Manager. Can someone comment on how
using this compares to using <t:saveState>? Are there situations in
which using one is preferred to using the other?
They do rather different things. t:saveState allows you to 'attach'
arbitrary data to the saved view state, effectively allowing you to
preserve backing bean state or other data across requests.
Shale Dialogs is more like a simple workflow management framework; it
allows you to describe a series of states and state transitions that
represent a 'dialog' between the user and your application. I think
Shale Dialogs and Spring Webflow are pretty similar in intent, if the
comparison helps.
Also, what other benefits (or drawbacks) can I expect from using Shale?
(I probably should ask this in the Shale user group, but I figured
people in this user group would have some interesting feedback as well.)
Shale is a 'value added' framework for JSF; in other words, it adds
various useful features on top of what JSF already provides. For an
overview of what's available, see the Shale Features section of the
project site:
http://struts.apache.org/struts-shale/index.html#Shale_Features
L.
