So, now that I've gotten my build problems sorted out, I was able to
make some quick progress on what I wanted to work on, enough that I want
to run this by everyone before I spit, polish and submit patches.
Ted and I were discussing some ideas at The Ajax Experience back in
October, specifically on how we could make S1 a little more
AJAX-friendly and useful to developers doing RIA development. One of
the ideas I had was the ability to have, essentially, "result types" in
S1, ala S2.
As a concrete example, say I have an Action that does this at the end:
return mapping.findForward("JSONResultType");
That mapping name would be a value specially recognized by Struts. The
result of doing that would be that the response is a JSON representation
of the appropriate ActionForm. One can easily imagine an XMLResultType,
a FreemarkerResultType, a DataVisionResultType, and so on.
Note that the developer *does not* need to add any configuration to
struts-config, they have only to specify that forward name, and the
ActionForm to JSON conversion is automatic.
I have this JSONResultType working right now, and it turns out it's a
minimally intrusive change to the S1 code base overall, consisting of:
* Some frankly minor changes to two Chain Commands
* The addition of a new package containing one new class (the class that
actually generates the result output, more to follow as new result types
are implemented)
* Some new dependencies: one during build (json-lib), and four at
runtime (if using that result type): Commons Collections, Commons Lang,
JSON-Lib and EZMorph).
To be clear, this code isn't complete and ready immediately, it's POC
grade right now, but it's not too far off either, maybe an hour or two
worth of polishing.
So, does anyone else think this is a worthwhile exercise? I certainly
think it is: the ability to have automatic conversion of an ActionForm
to JSON, XML, or whatever else, means S1 can become a true service
provider for AJAX-based clients with no real effort on the developers'
parts. It's not a huge change to the Struts code base, doesn't break
compatibility in any way (I suppose unless someone happens to have the
exact forward names I'm proposing here in their app already), and aside
from the added dependencies, I don't see a down-side.
Thoughts?
Frank
--
Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com
AIM/Yahoo: fzammetti
MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Author of "Practical Ajax Projects With Java Technology"
(2006, Apress, ISBN 1-59059-695-1)
and "JavaScript, DOM Scripting and Ajax Projects"
(2007, Apress, ISBN 1-59059-816-4)
Java Web Parts - http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net
Supplying the wheel, so you don't have to reinvent it!
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