Hi Per-Olof,
On Tuesday, September 3, 2002, at 02:08 AM, Per-Olof Norén wrote:
> 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
This is great stuff!
I discovered OJB recently and I was investigating it to see how it
compares with Castor JDO. I was planning to start building a similarly
complex application using the flow and OJB or Castor.
It would be really great if you can make a simple example out of your
code, so it can be packaged with Cocoon as a demonstration of the
control flow layer.
> 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();
I've recently checked in some changes in the control flow which allows
you to create sessions from the flow layer. The idea is to maintain the
state of the global variables across different top-level function
invocations. E.g. suppose you have two functions, login() and
addToCart(), which look like this:
var user;
function login()
{
// send the appropriate pages to the user to have the user log in
user = new Package.com.my.application.User(username, password, ...);
// create a user session to preserve the value of the global variables
cocoon.createSession();
}
function addToCart()
{
if (user == null)
login();
// make use of the 'user' global variable
}
In this example, both login() and addToCart() are functions that can be
called from the sitemap using <map:call function="..."/>. The value of
all the global variables is essentially preserved, once the
createSession() function is called.
I'll commit an example of this feature. Using this, you no longer have
to maintain things in the servlet session object, just make your
'userId' a global variable in your flowscript, and make sure you call
createSession() in one of the functions called earlier in the process.
> Does anyone have any idea´s?
>
> I will soon send a little patch for jpath.xsl that fixes for-each
> functionality that we use.
Please do so. I also have some changes to the logicsheet to fix some
compilation errors when the same expression is used multiple times
throughout an XSP.
I'll commit the changes described above and my little example soon.
Regards,
--
Ovidiu Predescu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://webweavertech.com/ovidiu/weblog/ (Weblog)
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/7464/ (Apache, GNU,
Emacs ...)
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