On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Arron Bates wrote:
> As for Craig's contrib request...
I should have been a little more complete in explaining my hesitation ...
it isn't really anything about technical merits at all, it is more a
strategic decision for the future of Struts. (So I'm not going to -1 it
either.)
I know how I *feel* about this, but I don't have enough rational reasoning
to explain and convince even me, let alone the rest of you, about it.
The key issue is whether we continue to materially enhance the Struts
specific tag libraries, versus whether/when we migrate to using JSTL tags
for all the bean and logic related stuff, and (later on) JavaServer Faces
for the user interface. I believe that this is going to be required for
the long term viability of Struts. The challenges are timing and
backwards compatibility support along the way, plus the fact that JSTL and
JSF will imply dependencies on Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 (which also have
some interesting implications for the rest of the Struts architecture).
My emotional concern is that adding significant new functionality to the
Struts-specific tag libraries sends the wrong message to Struts users.
Case study - we're building a nice user adminstration webapp in Tomcat,
based on Struts. It needed a couple of presentation tags (notably, a tree
control) to achieve the user interface objectives. At the moment, that
tag lives inside the admin app (although easily separable). Many would
say it would make a dandy start on a GUI controls taglib for Struts.
Would such a taglib be useful to Struts users right now? Yes
Would such a taglib be yet one more thing the app would need to change
later when we switch to Faces? Yes
Will users who want to use the Faces version of a tree control have to
wait until Faces is delivered? Yes
Does that give you a feel for why I am conflicted about this?
Craig
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