Forgive me for being lazy about trying out
applets with Struts. I haven't "worked" it. Struts may be
a few releases from supporting applets in general. But my requirements are
more limited, as follows:
I want to run a tree viewer applet with dynamic
tree expansion (and collapsing). "Dynamic" because the node expansion info
will gathered on the fly and fed to the live applet for display. This is
unlike DHTML techniques (like HierMenus) which are fully populated in the
JavaScript to begin with.
There seem to be many such dynamic applets for
trees about. They are pretty cheap, pretty quick and pretty pretty.
The "Tree Navigation System" from Sirius Computer Consultants www.jpowered.com is a good example, but
any I'm not locked into any particular component software.
One of the advantages of a tree display, rather
than a path walk, is that you can see as much (or as little) of any
sub-tree as you want in one "page" display.
In Struts you can use cascading sets of
<html:select> option lists to implement an "uncle" tree, a more limited
form of tree display. You see your uncles, but none of
your cousins. At least with the MVC in Struts you can
navigate to an off-tree action and then use the "Back" button to recover the
current state of the "uncle" tree.
The Sirius Tree Navigation System doesn't support
"Back". If you go back, the tree has collapsed to its orignal,
tight state. This is not what I want. I want what
Struts does, leave the tree as it was before I navigated off-tree.
So, I have these three criteria:
- Dynamic "refresh" (from a shared database) each time a node is expanded to sub-nodes.
- Can see your cousins if you wish to.
- Can use the "Back" button to recover the tree display after following a link off-tree. (No dynamic update.)
How do I get there?
I'm out of luck.
It still seems that Struts is a few realeases away
from anything like this. I guess I need to look at Barracuda again.
Barracuda seems more applet-friendly, but I would guess that I am still out of
luck.
.
