Luca Morandini wrote:
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
When we introduced flowscript, we decided that <map:pipeline> should
be the central switchboard through which *all* request go,
<cut/>
- the processing flow in a sitemap goes *first* in the controller if
there is one, and *second* in the view. Going to a <map:pipeline> to
call back a function should really be an exceptional case, or even
forbidden.
Hmm... my favorite selling proposition about Cocoon is "look no
further than the sitemap to know which component answers an URI", and
this dynamic pipeline concept would shatter this.
Generally speaking, in the procedural vs. declarative debate I drifts
towards the latter. For example, I see the advantages in using
something like Spring Web Flow, not the least of them being the easy
development of tools (AndroMDA maybe ?).
If you can roundtrip between a model and a procedural language, then
tooling is not a problem. I've been using this approach for 10 years
starting in 1990 with a pre-OO design method used in the space
industry[1]. We had a tool that was generating Ada or C code from
graphical models, containing special markers around code sections that
could be changed directly in the code.
We wrote hundreds of thousands lines of code using this technique
without ever using a declarative language interpreter. Just plain Ada
and C. And this without ever loosing our ability to change the program's
structure using graphical tools.
Sylvain
[1] http://www.estec.esa.nl/wmwww/WME/oot/hood/
--
Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies
http://bluxte.net http://www.anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
