Hi everyone,
We've been talking about this for quite awhile in various channels, and
I wanted to take a few minutes and formalize the discussion. I'll
capture the highlights of this discussion in the wiki afterwards. I'll
start by posting my own thoughts, and let you all respond.
Up to this point, Continuum has been built on a web framework called
Summit, which is part of the Plexus project, and using Velocity as the
page rendering technology. Summit is still a very young project, and as
a result has its problems. Given the proliferation of web frameworks out
there, it seems natural to wonder whether we couldn't find something
more mainstream and mature that will fit our needs.
The key goal here is to make the web tier as easy to understand as
possible by the widest possible audience, without sacrificing anything
in the way of quality. To that end, criteria might include:
* tool support
* maturity in the form of multiple final releases (or at least one)
* good integration with JSP (it's the most widely-used rendering
technology out there for java)
* ready availability of good documentation
* integration with a decent security library (think acegi)
* others?
Another big concern is that we need to be able to make this web
framework integrate with Plexus without too much funny business. I don't
expect that to be a big problem, but worth mentioning.
I know that a certain amount of work has been done by Trygve and
Emmanuel to get WebWork running inside Plexus. Is this the best
framework? A quick check of Amazon showed three books, only one of which
is completely concerned with WW. SpringMVC might be another option,
since it has probably the most natural integration with Acegi. There is
a certain amount of overlap between Spring and Plexus that we'd probably
have to map with a custom Spring container or something, but that's
likely to be everywhere, since dependency injection is such a hot topic
(and very useful).
What do you all think?
-john
