Hi cocooners, I´d like to give a real-life scenario using flowscripts. We are currently in the end phase of developing the base of an enterprise system used for ordering/invoicing/crm tasks. All of this is done in cocoon using the flowscript and Jakarta OJB, Axis and torque.
We decided to use the flowscript since its *the* way of creating web based, data-intensive business systems. In theese scenarios the focus are at error handling and usability. The gui is of course important but not in the "flashy" sence, but rather that its possible to work with the system for a whole work-day. Model: OJB View: XSP´s Controller: flowscript The Model: Trying the axis wsdl2java tools to connect to SOAP services was as easy as stealing candy from a child, not a single problem. This inspired us to look for a similar approach when using a local dbms for the other data. After some looking around we found OJB to be perfect. We modified the Ant tasks that reads db metadata and creates a file called repository.xml that is the database schema. The next ant task is to create beans for each table in the repository.xml file. This is done by velocity templates. Finally an "Operations" interface is created by hand. This interface class is then used by the flowscript. Its incredible easy to modify the database, we just run our ant build that rebuilds all our beans. Using axis we can also wrap our "Operations" interface as a web service for future integration. The views: We created a sort of language for page definition that abstracted html in xsp´s and this allows hard core coders to create pages that are graphically pleasing. The concept of xsp as the source of the pages is perfectly fine, since it allows for some rendering logic to be applied. For example disabling buttons and parts of a page. All data is provided in a java.util.Hashmap sent from the flowscript. The controller: This is of course the flowscript. In here we program the flow-logic and call the Model(Operations interface) for retrieving / updating / creating data. We´ve devided some common functions such as showing error messages and delete confirms into "functions.js". To summarize: Using flowscript, xsp and OJB is the *perfect* match for creating web-based enterprise systems Since this is the dev list, i also have som dev questions: I have problems putting things in a session variable from the flowscript using this syntax: cocoon.session["user_id"] = user.getUser_id(); Does anyone have any idea´s? I will soon send a little patch for jpath.xsl that fixes for-each functionality that we use. /Per-Olof Norén --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
