On 6/6/06, Martin Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 6/6/06, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Martin Cooper wrote: > > No. FOP = whatever. I consider anything --> PDF to be out of scope / too > > specialised here. > > Ah, ok, gotcha, I understand now :) > > PDF generation is a fairly common thing to do from a webapp though, no? No, not really. At least, not compared to things like SSO, LDAP authentication, access control, distributed sessions, persistence, and a lot of other things Struts doesn't bake in. I know I've had to do it plenty... WW has always been, from what I've > seen, a framework that tried to have a wider scope than Struts did... > for example, built-in support for DWR and Dojo, built-in support for > continuations, integration with Quartz and JasperReports... all of this > could be argued is out of scope for a web framework, couldn't it? Sure it could. And I might well argue that way, for some of those examples. I > don't see PDF generation, *assuming it's a somewhat limited capability*, > to be too specialized. I do. Sorry, but it's just not in the same league as other much more common cases.
I didn't make it clear in my previous comment ... but I totally agree with Martin that actually *building* an anything->PDF converter as part of Struts is out of scope. But that's a different thing from providing a PdfResult interface that has a strategy pattern plugin to configure an adapter for your favorite PDF generation tool ... perhaps with an example application that has an implementation for one particular PDF generation library (i.e. the implementation itself is a demo, not part of the core of Struts). That kind of approach would be perfectly reasonable to me. As would some eventual commitment for the Struts project to support some small number of adapters to particular PDF generation libraries where we had committers willing to maintain the adapters in response to API changes in the underlying generators. Frank, does that difference in viewpoint help you see the scoping issue here? --
Martin Cooper
Craig
