Martin Cooper wrote:
Given the following paragraphs, I think we might be on different planets. ;-)
Could be... some would say I rent a summer home on some distant world :)
I don't see that you need Freemarker or anything like it, nor do I see any reason you couldn't continue to use the json-lib package you're already using. Why not simply add a rendering servlet that does the work of picking up the appropriate bean and rendering it by calling into the library, sending the output to the servlet output stream? If you do that, you need *no* other changes to Struts. Anyone who wants to use it simply adds the rendering servlet to their web.xml, adds a global forward (or more than one, if we want to parameterise things) that forwards to the servlet, and then uses that as the target of their actions. Done.
I wouldn't like this for two reasons... first, it's something additional the developer has to do on top of Struts. I'm trying to avoid that. Second, that doesn't sound terribly efficient to me. Having to essentially invoke a whole new request cycle, servlet invocation, all the overhead that involves, sounds like a bad idea to me in terms of performance and scalability.
(Although, I think you're right WRT Freemarker... as the idea has evolved from discussion with Paul here, I tend to agree with you on that at this point. Freemarker could well be another result type, just like in S2, but it shouldn't be necessary for the JSON or XML result)
Why do we need anything more complicated than that?
What's the point of using a framework like Struts in the first place if it can't provide something (relatively) simple like this? That would be my answer. I don't view returning a special forward, or better still, a new subclass as I suggested to Paul, as more complicated, just the opposite: I see it as clearly less so.
Besides, I think the more the answer to things like this is "add this piece that's not a part of Struts", the less point there is to Struts. I mean, after all, shouldn't we then have told Musachy that the JSON plugin should be a filter, servlet, or something like that? I haven't seen a single person say that, and rightly so. I don't see it being any different, except that S2 has a plug-in mechanism for things like that... but at the end of the day it's still a part of the framework, if only a loosely-coupled one, not an external piece that I as an application developer then have to manage.
Martin Cooper
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! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
