At the moment I'm trying to envision how the Dialog features of Shale are really going to work to provide the proposed features in the initial Shale Wiki document. I think the major issues that I have right now with the direction that the implemented code is going revolve around this.
1) I think that it might be a good idea to rename "dialog" to something else whilst it's still early days - although dialog is descriptive of this scope in many ways, it also has UI connotations which may be misleading. "Process" is probably a better generalisation for the scope?
2) How is the dialog/process scope defined? Craig has proposed the simple solution of using directory boundaries to define this. Although I can appreciate the elegance of this, it pretty much clobbers any page reuse model within Shale. Now it may be that this is not important to everyone - if you assemble pages from Tiles or something similar you can argue that page re-use is not important as long as region / fragment re-use is possible. But it's pretty important for us (Oracle).
I think that generally process (dialog) scope should be more than just a bucket. If I have to manually manage the teardown of such a scope then I'm not gaining too much in using a framework. On the other hand, if I want the framework to manage the state scope for me automatically then that framework will have to be richer in terms of metadata to manage inter-scope state mapping on entry and exit, plus plug points for programmatic interaction
3) Faces navigation metadata is not enough. If you take the view that processes (dialogs) are re-usable components, as the Shale specification does, then that implies that they should be pluggable into a faces navigation case. If you don't do this, then you've not really got a component model as the navigation will depend on the components implementation details
Any Thoughts / Feedback on this?
Duncan Mills Oracle Corp.
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