Don Brown wrote:
With my extra day off today, I took a look at ways to simplify Struts. Having been impressed by the simplicity of NanoWeb, I particularly looked at ways to change the Struts concept of Actions and ActionForwards to support POJO's and configurations that allow new actions to be written without requiring any changes to struts-config.xml. I described my findings in my weblog: http://www.jroller.com/page/mrdon/20040706#zero_configuration_with_struts
What does the Struts developer community think of providing direct support for regular JavaBeans as actions? One feature of JSF I liked was how actions were simply no-arg methods on a JavaBean, making them easy to write and test.
It's one of my favorite features too :-).
Indeed, one possible avenue for further development would be to start with the infrastructure that JSF provides (managed beans, method and value bindings, perhaps navigation) and glue on the controller piece for higher level management of business logic and transactions. JSF components can be view-technology independent fairly easily (Hans Bergsten's book shows two different approaches to writing your own ViewHandler, for example). And, doing this would let you architect things the way WebWork does if you like that (an "action" in their world is essentially our Action + ActionForm in one class, instantitated per request).
Incidently, I built my extension off struts-chain, so it works side-by-side regular Struts actions, forwards, and forms. With commons-chain out of the sandbox and Struts 1.2.1 around the corner (thanks Ted), I think it is time to start integrating struts-chain into the core.
+1. We need that for first-class portlet support as well.
Don
Craig
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
