I need to build a project where several servers will exchange data on a regular basis and present the outcome rearranged for statistical analysis, status information and so on.
After reading tons of books and articles I found that Castor would be the natural choice to build the infrastructure, so I installed it and tested a while with wonderful results. I have a complete data model, already expressed in DTD, designed the database, generated the classes with source generator and I happily marshal/unmarshal get/store my persistent objects with JDO/XML.
In my plans servers will exchange their data/objects using message SOAP calls to AXIS-enabled services where the message part is the complete XML struture of my object to be unmashalled and stored on the other end.
But then when it comes to the presentation you need to couple Castor with some site/portal/content management product and here I'm lost. I've tried several, all opensource, most of them ASF products, but it seems to me there is some sort of overlapping in features/functionality among them.
Struts is great, well documented, and it works well with Velocity templates, but also Turbine is very attractive and works well with Velocity, Turbine delivers a bunch of services which are indeed extremely useful, like XML-RPC to manage SOAP messages, a Castor service to marshall/unmashall objects and deals with persistent objects through Torque (which ut this one uses a different approach than Castor JDO - for instance its default behaviour is to dedicate a single DB table to keep a whole object hierarchy in order to avoid dealing with SQL joins).
And then why not Jetspeed to build up my site/portal. Or wouldn't it be better to work on native XML instead through Cocoon ? And what about the presentation of object properties (to an HTML client through web pages), is it better using Velocity variables, Tag-Libraries, XML rendered through XSL via XSLT ?
To be honest I'm lost, every time I find that a particlar set of tools/frameworks is just the perfect one for my needs, then suddenly I find there is some different one which deals much better than the previous in some particular area.
Then my question: is there someone who can suggest, given my needs, a suitable, flexible/adaptable set of tools/packages/frameworks to make my life easier ?
Actually my Castor-related question is: given the requirements, is it better to use Castor XML/JDO framework, Turbine/Torque Object persistence ? And as for the marshalling/unmarshalling framework why not using AXIS BeanSerializer ?
My requirement, as I said, is a solid framework to accomplish:
- object persistence to a database
- object transfer (to a remote J2EE application)
- message communication (in terms of actions to be performed remotely)
- easy presentation
- some sort of content management (less important)
- (possibly) avoid learning 25 different languages to accomplish all that...
I thank you in advance for any reply to this long posting.
Piero
-- Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
----------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of:
unsubscribe castor-dev
