On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Ted Husted wrote:
> Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 14:04:42 -0400
> From: Ted Husted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Workflow Management
>
> I've spent some time with this, and it's a truly stellar package ;-)
>
Thanks ;-)
> Any plans regarding the Registry interface and base class? For testing
> purposes, I put one together using Activities as a base (annexed), and
> reserved namespace for adding processes later. The base class implements
> a FastHashMap for the Activities, following what Struts does for
> Actions. I'll commit it if it doesn't conflict with any immediate plans.
>
I've got a basic Registry implementation sitting on my disk -- I'll go
ahead and commit it. It doesn't have any built-in mechanism to read in
the activities - do you think that should be from a single XML file, or
from a file per activity?
> I'm trying to hack together a Struts version, and add a demo to
> Struts-Simple with my other wizard demos, but would like more than one
> activity to play with ;-)
>
It's not the only way to do it, but my thinking was to define a separate
Action per activity that your application supports. That way, you could
do things like focus on a single activity at a time, and not have fights
between your developers over the one-and-only activity definition file
(like the fights that can happen now over struts-config.xml).
> So far, I split the servlet into a "service" component to load the
> Registry/Activities, and put the code that executed the Steps in to an
> Action. So the model I'm working on here is the one where there is one
> Struts Action to handle all the Acivities (though I'm thinking there
> will be different mappings, for the local forwards).
>
That (local forwards) is another reason I liked Action-per-activity
instead. But it's not clear what the best approach will be -- having it
both ways will let us experiment and figure that out.
> Three excrutiately minor things:
>
> 1. Do we want to use http for a package name instead of web, to
> reinforce the relationship with the Sun packages?
>
Personally, I find "web" a bunch easier to type, and to pronounce out
loud, than "http" :-)
> 2. BaseScope.remove() seems only to remove the object from the
> LOCAL_SCOPE, rather than all scopes as documented. Should I fix that, or
> am I missing something?
>
Go ahead and fix it if you want - I will make sure you have commit privs
on the commons sandbox. Don't forget to add yourself to the developer
list in the status doc.
> 3. BaseContextBean declares HashMap scopes but doesn't seem to use it. I
> don't understand JPath well enough to tell if it needs to use it or not.
>
Nope, it doesn't ... that was a leftover from a previous design iteration.
It can be removed (along with the import for HashMap).
Craig
PS: There's also occasional discussion of this component on the
commons-dev list -- at least for the stuff that is not Struts-specific.
