It is great that Maverick is 'done'. Of the model 2 frameworks, I still
think it is the best, though WebWork and SpringMVC have some more
features (which is not nescesarily a good thing).
I bumped into the same shortcommings and a ton more. I'd like to
specifically add some problems I have with model 2 frameworks:
- When pages get more complex, your code will be spaghetti. No matter
how you fix it (chaining actions, having a massive base action class or
using utility classes all over the place), it gets to be a mess.
- The procedural nature of the servlet-front-controller pattern doesn't
help you develop OO skills.
- No reuse. Never thought that would be a real problem, but it is. We
had the need to develop variants of applications, where we could have
had a large advantage when page/ panel reuse would have been possible.
As it is not with the model 2 frameworks, you end up with a lot of code
(and configuration!) duplication. We also see a lot code duplication for
things like pageable lists et.
- No matter which templating technology you use, XML, JSP, or Velocity,
webdesigners don't like it too much compared to 'just' HTML, with which
they can use their editors of choice.
One area in which Maverick still shines, is for sites that have a XML
backing. For that, the transformations system works great. For future
sites with this characteristic, I'll check out Tagonist.
However, I 'moved on' too and I am currently active for component based
framework Wicket (http://wicket.sourceforge.net). The project was
started by Jonathan Locke, who worked on AWT and Swing for Sun and did a
lot of good work for Java over at Microsoft. It is not as minimalistic
as tagonist, but it's aims are to make developing web application
easier, prettier and generally more fun without sacrificing enterprise
needs, like scalibility etc. I just returned from JavaOne where we had a
presentation and were part of a 'web framework smackdown' panel
disussion. Pretty exciting for a framework that is this new (released
1.0 just last month).
Anyway, I'd like to stress that I'm not abbandoning Maverick either (it
helps that there is just no work to be done ofcourse), and will still
support its WebWork-ish extension Baritus.
Good luck with your project Jeff! Regards,
Eelco Hillenius
Jeff Schnitzer wrote:
Hi everyone. All has been pretty quiet on the Maverick front for
quite a while, but that's not surprising - Maverick is pretty much
"done". However, over the last couple years I kept bumping into
shortcomings of the servlet-front-controller approach taken by
Maverick, Struts, WebWork, and friends. Specifically:
* It's hard to build portals or otherwise compose pages from smaller
bits of component functionality.
* You tend to evolve towards one Controller/Action class per screen.
Controllers rarely get reused.
* If you have more than a couple web developers, they bump into each
other when editing the xml sitemap config file.
* Explaining the xml sitemap config file to nonprogrammers is unpleasant.
So I started tinkering.
I started out trying to turn Maverick inside-out by creating a custom
JSP tag that would instantiate Maverick controllers ad-hoc from within
JSP files. It worked reasonably well and allowed you to instantiate
multiple controllers on a page, thus allowing each individual
controller to have finer functional granularity. Pages which required
form processing went through the standard MVC pattern, but pages which
just render data (ie most pages in most webapps) merely require a
standard JSP with a few invocations of a custom tag - you could add
pages without touching maverick.xml.
Still, the model wasn't a perfect fit - abusing the Maverick APIs like
this felt clunky. So I tinkered some more.
I ultimated ended up starting from scratch, creating Tagonist.
Tagonist is a *lot* simpler than Maverick. It's necessarily JSP-only,
so you can't use Velocity or XSLT. It doesn't (by itself) handle
document transformations. It doesn't have any special switching logic
for internationalization.
What Tagonist provides is the basic MVC glue in a very compact package:
* No servlets required. All your URLs point to plain old JSPs.
* No sitemap configuration, XML or otherwise. In fact, there are no
config files whatsoever.
* You can build fine-grained Action classes and compose them
arbitrarily on a page.
* You can use Tagonist on any JSP page, even if the page is already
part of some other framework, be it Maverick, Struts or some fancy
portal application. There are no integration issues.
* Tagonist is, I kid you not, less than 500 lines of code (including
whitespace!). The tagonist jar is 8k.
If this sparks your curiosity, look at http://tagonist.tigris.org/
I've been using Tagonist in production for about four months and I'm
happy enough with the results that I've released the 1.0 version. The
tagonist distribution includes a port of the same Friendbook
application that Maverick comes with, but if you'd like to see a live
tagonist app, check out http://www.similarity.net.
To anticipate some questions...
Does this mean I am abandoning support for Maverick? No. But
Maverick hasn't needed any updates in quite some time, and I do all my
web development with Tagonist these days.
What about Velocity? I love Velocity and I still use it for
templating everything except web pages. However, JSP has advanced
considerably in the last few years. The JSP2.0 expression language
and JSTL incorporate most of what made Velocity special, and new
features like .tag files are superior in most respects to Velocity
macros.
What about transforms? If you need the fancier transformations like
XSLT, FOP, or the like, Maverick is great. However, if all you need
are Document transforms, JSP2.0 custom tags (ie .tag files) are better
both from an ease-of-use and performance perspective. Compare the
Tagonist Friendbook with the Maverick Friendbook to see what I mean.
Thanks,
Jeff Schnitzer
Voodoodyne Inc.
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