I originally wrote a Struts app that acted much like the struts-example. I
feel it's a good separation of business logic from presentation, and that it
follows the principles of MVC pretty well.
Now the GUI developers are looking to integrate all of my very ugly HTML
pages into a common look and feel. I thought that the struts-template
mechanism would be perfect. I can define my header, sidebar, footer and
dynamic content using this library.
However, I noticed that the struts-template mechanism seems to be based on
JSP pages, as opposed to actions. For example, the InsertTag class' doEndTag
method calls pageContext.include, so I can't simply specify:
<template:put name='content' content='/displayRoles.do?type=external'/>
When I do that, I get an exception (which makes sense).
I'd like the best of both worlds by providing the templating capability and
still keeping my action-based web site. I was thinking of extending the
template:put tag to accept something like this:
<template:put name='content' action='/displayRoles.do?type=external'/>
That way, the action class will execute and eventually forward itself on to
the "success" page defined in struts-config.xml.
So, did I miss something here? Is my analysis of this situation right? Are
people using struts-template in a capacity other than a layout/presentation
manager? Would the Components framework by Cedric solve this? Finally, if I
got it all right, is there any interest in seeing this type of extension?
Thanks for your time.
--
Dan Miser
http://www.distribucon.com
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