On 1 Feb 2004, at 19:27, Steve Krulewitz wrote:
Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:We are slowly deprecating server pages in favor of more MVC+ approaches (that is: flows control + business objects + view templates)
In Cocoon 2.2, XSP will probably move to their own block and removed from the core (this means they will still be supported, but not considered core technology and not advocated as "the way").
I still find the esql taglib to be a very useful and easy way to go from SQL query to an XML document. If xsp is deprecated, the only other way to easily do this is the SQLTransformer, but it is lacking many of the features that the esql taglib has.
Maybe adding support for iterating through ResultSets in a JXTemplate might make this easier to do from flow? Or is this already possible?
I think that the ESQL logicsheet is the only really valuable and unique thing that we have in XSP, so, yeah, I totally understand your concern.
At the same time, I'm more and more convinced that database access should happen at the view level, but should be something that should happen at the 'control' level.
This also goes hand in hand with the approach of isolating the sql statements and wrap them around objects. But I also understand that many people out there like SQL and find it really productive and they won't move to one database to another, so they see no reason to go the extra mile of providing decoupling abstractions for their data model.
Chris introduced some database connection features in flowscript at one point, but I still think that's going too far and might yield the wrong impression that you should use flowscript for your core business logic (and database access should definately be part of that).
At the same time, it strikes me that ESQL was meant to be used with the modular database actions and input modules... it streams for a unification in some avalon component that can do database and resultset manipulation in an easy and predictable way.
But not being the database guy around here, I'm not the one to talk about these things so I'll be glad if somebody else wants to come forward.
One thing is for sure: XSP is showing its age and we should move forward... but without loosing its value.
-- Stefano.
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