Ian Bicking wrote:I haven't been using actions very much up until now, but I used them in the Wiki and found the method layout to be suboptimal. I think other people have had the same experience.
Yep. We've been grouchy about this for a couple of years. We made very similar changes to what you describe in our FormKit.
Second, _respond invokes writeHTML always, not just when no action was found.
Yes, this is what should happen; UNLESS there's a redirect pending. Many times, after we do an action, we want to redirect to another URI. We do a check in writeHTML and bail if necessary, but I've always thought that it should be "deeper" in the servlet, perhaps in _respond() (or before; see next thought).
If you're using Page.sendRedirectAndEnd it won't be a problem -- that immediately terminates the request. (I think it still calls sleep, but that's it)
What do people think about making the action calls come from the awake() step rather than the respond() step? I think that respond is about sending data to the client; typically full of writeln() calls. Actions don't seem to be for that; they seem to be for writing to databases, parsing form input, setting state, etc. These things seem like they should come before "respond".
Basically, what we'd like to see in the "new lifecycle" would be something like:
1. wake up (get connections to databases, open session, whatever) 2. do any business that's required (run a query, parse a file, whatever) 3. send output, which is either a redirect or content 4. go to sleep (close connections, etc.)
We always do step 2 things in actions, but have always thought that they shouldn't be jacked into this "pre-respond" place.
With the technique I describe it's really a 4 step cycle -- run awake, run the action (always some action, if only defaultAction), run writeHTML, run sleep. Technically the action and writeHTML happen in respond, but you only see the respond method when you are looking at it from WebKit's perspective. An an application author I never override that, so it's not a problem.
Where you write output is really a matter of convention -- you can do it anywhere, even in sleep.
I like the idea of the action and awake being separate, where awake is a kind of general setup and action is specific. You'll still want the general setup, because presumably there's something that ties all the actions together into a single servlet. So I think four steps are called for. If this gets added to awake, it would be awkward, because Page.awake would invoke your actions before you had a chance to do your servlet-specific actions.
Also note, though, that the awake/respond/sleep sequence is less hard coded (in CVS) than it was before -- you can override all three with runTransaction. So another completely separate method could be added to that sequence. But I also don't think it's so bad to add it to respond, so long as it happens before writeHTML (but not in lieu of writeHTML).
Ian
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