At 09:20 AM 4/11/2002 -0400, allan li wrote: >Hi everyone, > >Could anybody give me some ideas about the comparison, relationships >between Cocoon2 and Struts, and how to use them together for a single web >application?
Cocoon and Struts have a lot of overlapping functionality, but different focuses. Cocoon and Struts both seek to implement frameworks for web development according, more or less, to the Model-View-Controller framework. The breakdown, as I see it, is roughly as follows: Model: - Cocoon's models are XML-centric in that Cocoon generators (which correspond more or less to the components responsible for pulling data from the model) produce XML that represents the model's contents. XSP pages are the main mechanism for doing so; XSP pages can source their data from the servlet context, or from databases, or from Java objects, or what have you. - Struts models are very Java-centric -- Struts tends to expect model components to be Java business objects, which produce state that gets stored in the servlet context (request, session, or application context), or which are themselves directly accessible from the servlet context. View: - Cocoon has a very flexible framework for generating many possible views of XML derived from a model. Cocoon supports pretty much anything you can do with XSLT or other XML tools (Batik, etc.). It is very easy to do complex things with XML in the Cocoon framework. - Struts focuses mainly on JSP out of the box for view rendering -- the default pattern with Struts is to use JSP to display content obtained from (objects in) the servlet context. However, Struts can be used with servlet chaining to hand off view responsibilities to other systems (there is work underway to do so with Velocity). Struts itself does little or nothing with XML or XSLT. Controller: - Cocoon has "Cocoon actions" which seem to have been latecomers to the Cocoon design. Most of the current controller work in Cocoon is oriented around the "Schecoon" scripting framework. This is very much a work in progress. - Struts is very controller-oriented, actually; Struts' entire ActionMapping system is completely about the controller layer. Struts makes it quite easy to get started building the logic of your website due to its controller-centric design. It is starting to look to me like it would be straightforwardly possible to write some Cocoon XSP pages which expect to be fed from a Struts controller system via servlet chaining. i.e. write your application logic in Struts, and write your view structure in Cocoon, thereby using Struts to do the controlling and Cocoon for the viewing. Cocoon is almost a bit overkill for this, since it has so much more functionality than simply XML transformation, but oddly it might wind up being easier to maintain this kind of hybrid system than it would be to build the whole thing in either Struts or Cocoon alone. We shall see :-) Cheers! Rob --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
