It may be a little pretentious to use the "RT" prefix, but this is a random thought, so here goes...
During some of my (admittedly small amounts of) work with Cocoon I have found myself having to deal with the generated source code for the sitemap and some XSP pages. Needless to say this was not a terribly pleasant experience. It occurred to me that the path a request takes through the sitemap, or the generation of content from an XSP page, can be seen as a slightly involved tree traversal. In combination with the Strategy pattern from the GOF, I got the following crazy idea: Why not parse the sitemap and create an in-memory representation (DOM,JDOM,???) where each node references both a component (Reader, Transformer, etc.) and a traversal strategy. When a request comes in: 1. Create the appropriate object encapsulating the parameters, etc. 2. Request a thread from a request handling thread pool 3. Pass the thread the request object and the root of the sitemap tree Traversal of the tree basically consists of: 1. Request the strategy for the current node 2. Ask the strategy to do its thing 2a. Which in most cases is likely to be a pre-order traversal, I think For some reason the conceptual model of a bunch of request objects traversing the sitemap tree seems a lot clearer than the current approach. Is this a good idea? I really don't know. It does everything the current approach does (I think), feels cleaner (to me) , and might make debugging easier (ask the request to report on the path through the tree that it took). Without trying I can't tell if it would be faster or slower, or what the RAM consumption would be. I am really curious as to why Cocoon has adopted the XSLT code generation approach? It really seems to make debugging a pain, as well as placing a dependency on having a java compiler on the runtime system. I haven't been trying too hard to figure out what the advantages to this approach are, but I haven't come up with any. I have no doubt that any interested readers will enlighten me :) Anyways, I don my asbestos underwear in preparation for your replies... Jason Foster --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
