On 7/5/05, Don Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > About Struts Dialogs, perhaps I missed it, but how does it differ from > Beehive? They seem to be tackling the same problem and are quite far > along. > > Don
Beehive is an all-ebracing system, they call a "control" anything that exposes some kind of resource. It is more generic. IIt uses annotations and metadata, external configuration, etc. It is just too complex. Anyway, if there is anything that I would compare Struts Dialogs with, it would be either JSF or portlets. Let me rewind and tell what was the original design goal. It was purely UI-related, and was born to life because I was unsatisfied with user experience of may web apps. You might see my article about redirect-after-post stuff on TSS. So, my library is implementation of this pattern in Struts. All you need is to use directly or extend DialogAction, and it will do everything else for you: two-phase input processing, managing state, saving error messages, correctly working with page reload and with Back button. This is the original goal and this is what I was selling. Here is the live demo which illustrates the idea: http://www.superinterface.com/strutsdialog/logincomponent.html The server is shared, so it may be down from time to time. The above design goal does not have anything with page controls, as you can see. After I implemented it, I thought that two-phase processing (aka redirect-after-post) allows to build componentized pages easily. You can just include a resource, containing HTML form. Then you submit input to the action defined in this form, not to the master page location. How to redraw the master page? Simple, the component redirects to it, and it reloads all it contains. The redirection location can be passed as parameter, but much simpler solution is to define it in config file. Now this became a second selling point: simple page controls using JSP. So much simpler than portlets. Much more limited too, accept input or POST, render youself on GET, share data via session object. But in many cases this is enough. Here is the second demo with the same component, embedded in JSP page: http://www.superinterface.com/strutsdialog/logincontrol.html The only changes are mappings in struts-config.xml, the Java code is the same as in previous example. So, better user experience and possibility to create page controls with only one new action class. Is it worth it? One action class (ok, two classes if considering SelectAction worth mentioning) versus a whole component framework like Beehive or portlet API. I think it is worth it. This can bring Struts back in the game, and boy, I want it to be back in the game, because I am too lazy to learn new framework each year. I really want people to understand what is that I am actually advertising ;-), so questions are welcome. Michael. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
