David G, or anyone: is there a reason that the TilesServlet class was removed from the distribution?
It was removed because Tiles had become so intertwined with Struts that the Struts developers did not want to support two Tile versions: one for use with Struts and another without.
Whoops; forgot we've got two David G's now -- it was David Graham who removed the other file, but given your interest in Tiles, obviously you're a good candidate for an answer.
Having said that, decoupling Tiles from Struts won't solve the problem that Martin brings up. That's an integration issue that's arisen due to the composable request processor. Integration with Tiles requires Struts to be Tiles-aware. Whether Struts is intertwined with Tiles is another issue.
Ah, now I'm understanding more. The TilesServlet really just initialized Tiles; I was thinking it serviced requests, and that you could forward request processing to it equivalently to how you forward request processing to a JSP.
So the critical service which the TilesPreProcessor performs which the TilesServlet doesn't is extracting a JSP path from the base tiles definition and setting things in motion so that control is forwarded there.
It still seems totally possible to write a smarter TilesServlet which might be mapped, for example, to serve <url-pattern>*.tiles</url-pattern>, and then it would have a simple process which derived the name of a tiles definition from the request URL in much the same way that Struts looks up ActionMappings.
If this were the case, then there would be no need for a TilesPreProcessor command, let alone for putting it in two locations in the chain. It wouldn't be backwards compatible, since most people probably don't use tiles names which would also be valid paths to which a request dispatcher could forward -- but we could deprecate the TilesPreProcessor once a smarter TilesServlet existed.
Isn't this essentially how people use Velocity for their view technology in Struts? From a cursory look-through, I don't see anything very critical to Struts done in this command.
Joe
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Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "Narrow minds are weapons made for mass destruction" -The Ex
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