I've gotten down to a 15,000 foot view of Barracuda, and it looks like
they are doing some nice work. All things remaining equal, I believe it
would be better if our approaches were compatible with Barracuda. For
example, if someone did want to do more with event processing, using as
much of Barracuda's as we can would be excellent, if nothing else is
compromised.
I would say that having distinct ActionForm's and databeans are a
necessary evil, in order to keep Struts loosely coupled with the
business layer. Though, techniques to generate both from a common
defination would be a real leap forward.
I'd also say that on a validation error, we should always return exactly
what the user entered without any transformations. The user's data
should be considered immutable, except by the user (at least until is
fully validated and submitted to the business layer), or by some
client-side helper that did the transformation then and there (which
would also have to be done server-side since we can't rely on the
clients!).
David Winterfeldt wrote:
>
> I just wanted to put this out there to see what people
> think since I took the time to look at how Barracuda
> worked. I like the idea of not having two classes
> (ActionForm and a data bean), but I guess there will
> be a few different tools to autogenerate these as time
> goes by. Do you autogenerate classes based on the xml
> file? You have all the information in the xml file to
> make this possible, right? I think most of the issues
> you mention could be worked around, but you're Mapper
> idea is much more flexible. Is any source for what
> you've done available to look at or is it proprietary
> (I do have the xml file you sent to the list)?
>
> David
