Jason Johnston wrote:
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Ugo Cei wrote:
Looks good to me. AFAIK, Ajax support works only with the template
macros, so it might not make sense to add this feature to the
transformer also. What is the orientation of the community towards
the transformer/macros ambiguity? I'd like to have just one
recommended implementation of this, so if macros are the way to go,
what about deprecating the forms transformer?
Well, macros are more powerful because they allow to do more than
templating with the widgets. A straightforward example is conditional
templating, e.g. displaying "There are now contacts" rather than an
empty table. This is not possible with a transformer, unless we add
an expression language and some control structures which will make it
yet another programming-language-in-XML...
OTOH, the transformer is useful when JXTG is not a option e.g. when
the generator is an XSP...
IIUC you can also use JX as a transformer, so wouldn't that cover this
case?
Because you should really avoid using JXTransformer if you want a
responsive application: this transformer basically feeds the JX
generator with the incoming SAX stream, meaning the template is full
reparsed and recompiled at each execution, which is highly inefficient.
IMO, we should make this very prominent in the doc and discourage such
usage, or even deprecate this transformer.
Anyway... to Ugo's question, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that
AJAX works regardless of whether the template is interpreted by JX or
the FormsTemplateTransformer, since it's the widgets themselves that
signal whether or not they have been updated by wrapping their SAX
output in a <bu:replace>.
Exactly.
Personally I usually use FormsTemplateTransformer for most forms,
unless I know for sure I'm going to need the extra expressive power of
JX. Mostly because I'm too lazy to jx:import the forms macros resource
in every template.
Hmm... the import is just a ctrl-c/ctrl-v away. Wow, this *is* lazyness :-)
Sylvain
--
Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies
http://people.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
