Sylvain,
I must admit that I only skimmed your post but I will go back and
re-read it. But this couldn't come at a more interesting time.
I recently got a new manager from outside the company. His first week
on the job he basically said "Why aren't we using struts. Everybody uses
struts. We should too." Then he talked to some folks in one part of the
company (we bought them a year or two ago) who are doing their own thing
and want to use JSF. So now he thinks JSF is the way to go. If I don't
quit first I am supposed to "re-evaluate" the choice for the
presentation framework.
Frankly, I looked at JSF it didn't see much I liked. But it has one
thing that is appealing and is something that the "other" group insists
they need. A stateful flow controller. They don't want to write
flowscript or javaflow - they just want to configure the application
flow. Frankly, this doesn't seem like too bad of an idea but I just
don't like how JSF does it. From what I saw the forms directly invoke
the actions which horribly mixes the model and the view.
So I did some searching and found Spring webflow. It looks to be
exactly what we need. So I am in the early stages of creating a
WebflowInterpreter using a refactored portion of the JavaInterpreter.
Now this may strike you as somewhat off the topic you were speaking to,
but it occurred to me a while ago that the webflow configuration would
actually be doing the vast majority of the controller logic. The only
thing left in the sitemap would be the pipelines needed to render the
views. And I am in absolute agreement that that is all that should be
in the sitemap.
Ralph
