David M Johnson wrote:
True, but Anil is enthusiastic and willing to make a specific proposal.
If it makes Roller easier to test, maintain or customize then it's worth
considering pulling in other parts of Spring.
Spring is a collection of frameworks and utilities and we're already
using some of that now. Plus, we're shipping the complete spring.jar
with Roller (so we can use Acegi).
So, my first reaction -- "not another framework" -- was really about
Spring MVC. We already have a Web/MVC framework.
The way that I'm thinking of using SpringMVC is extremely simple and
shouldn't be compared to Struts or most other MVC frameworks. What I'm
working on is really just a thin wrapper around the Servlet interface,
sort of a Servlets++. At this point, my sandbox refactoring is mixing
in 3 classes and two interfaces from SpringMVC into
org.roller.presentation.velocity -- a total of about 6 method calls to
learn. The biggest impact is that the Velocity Context is being
replaced by a Map/HashMap in many existing classes.
I should be able to get a detailed proposal and possibly a
proof-of-concept (probably non-working) patch just to give you an idea
of how simple this is and the benefits received in flexibility and view
independence.
If I thought a using a
framework instead of our page servlets would improve Roller (maybe it
does), I would be investigating the new Struts2/WorkWork stuff.
> That
> should (?) be the easiest migration path for our existing Struts UI and
> couldn't it do pretty much the same things as Spring/MVC for our
> page/feed rendering code? That's an honest question -- I don't know the
> answer.
I don't know the answer either -- I looked at WebWork briefly and it
doesn't seem to have this thin-wrapper-around-Servlets subset that
applies well to org.roller.presentation.velocity. But I might have
missed something.
Once I submit my proposal, if someone points out a way to achieve
similar results with Struts2/WebWork, then I'm all for it (but may not
commit to writing *all* of the code ;))
I am enthusiastic and willing to make a specific proposal :) I just
need a few more days.
Regards,
Sean
