WebMacro 0.94 was released today:
http://webmacro.org/Download.html
WebMacro's creation several years ago put Model/View/Controller
servlet programming in the limelight. Now there's a new stable
release of WebMacro with some significant improvements.
The idea behind WebMacro is that everyone should own their own
work. A page designer should be able to create the look, feel, and
flow of a site without requiring help from an application programmer.
An application programmer should be able to implement functionality
without having to trip over HTML codes. And a core developer should
be able to implement an object model representing a business's core
functionality without dealing with either the servlet API or HTML.
Essentially this is a Model/View/Controller approach to servlet
design. Since WebMacro's initial release a few years ago lots of
people have talked about MVC for servelts--but few systems actually
implement a pure MVC environment. JSP certainly doesn't, providing
you the tools to enforce an MVC design on yourself, but offering
no language support for the concept.
In WebMacro the model component is a set of JavaBeans. WebMacro
can automatically instantiate JavaBeans on a template, introspect
them, and analyze them so that they can be used on a page as-is,
with no additional effort required on the part of a bean developer.
The view component is a template. It contains some simple script
codes to enable repeating blocks, conditional inclusion, pulling
in external URLs and so forth. No programmatic logic is allowed or
possible inside the view.
Finally, the controller is the servlet itself: it's responsible
for managing the session, working out which view to return, and
performing session management tasks like reporting and tracking.
WebMacro 0.94 has been a long time coming but it adds a lot on top
of this model. WebMacro is now a completely pluggable framework,
which loads all of its core components from a configuration file.
Thus you can change how templates are loaded, what syntax is
available within a page, how templates are parsed, and most
everything else.
Also new in recent versions of WebMacro are context tools. A
ContextTool allows you to automatically instantiate a Java bean on
a template. Back end programmers then provide a set of beans which
front-end template developers can use at will.
This gives the template designers the freedom to create the pages they want, and the
back end developers the freedom to write pure Java code. Everybody gets to own their
own work.
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