You mention annotations, and that is definitely the way to go, to move from a procedural style to a declarative. I note that Rife is using Constraints to implement (in a JDK 1.4 context) what other frameworks are trying to do now with 1.5 :)
This is obvious I guess; all I want to say is that it might be relatively easy to make Rife do these things with annotations instead. Code would be cleaner, and it would boost the attractiveness of the framework while still retaining the additional niceties of the Rife API. You talk about using autodiscovery to detect forms variables and forms processing methods, and I think that would be great. I wonder if (for example) it would be useful if an Element could use annotations to declare the forms variables it needs and their default widget types, and with the possibility to declare custom "widget loaders". FWIW I wonder if you might get some inspirations from Stripes, a new framework that rolled out recently and uses annotations very heavily. It got lots of "hey that's cool!" comments, but I haven't read yet any stories about people actually using it. http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=36388 http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripes/Home http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripes/Annotation+Reference HTH fred -- F.Baube * "Happy songs never made me happy. Georgetown/MSFS/1988 * A lot of sad songs have." email fbaube#welho.com * -- Mira Aroyo, Ladytron gsm +358 41 536 8192 * wmd 60°11'10.8"N 24°57'36.9"E _______________________________________________ Rife-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users
