After reading a somewhat interesting post by Russell Beattie in which he mentions the desire to separate the URL that a user sees from the actual logic and data that it represents, it got me thinking about the approaches that one can take in Struts to achieve something similar. I don't think the way he refers to this practice is correct. I'm more used to referring to it as URL parameter rewrite or masking. For those that don't know what I am talking about, here's an example.
Say you have an URL like so: http://www.mysite.com/do/SomeAction?param1=value1¶m2=value2 After doing some magic it looks like this to the user: http://www.mysite.com/do/SomeAction/param1/value1/param2/value2 It's somewhat easy to do this if you use Apache in front of your container. Using a module, you can mask and unmask the URL before and after it reaches your container. It's somewhat common practice in PHP and Perl based sites that I've seen. That's where I first learned the trick. Why do this? Well the most common reason is to provide search engine friendly URLs. The other more interesting reason is to hide away your specific technology implementation from the URL. For example, the URL could look something like this: http://www.mysite.com/html/SomeAction/param1/value1 or even http://www.mysite.com/SomeAction/html/param1/value1 It also has the advantage of making the URLs somewhat easier to remember, if you don't have a lot of parameters that is. Cocoon seems to do this as Russell mentions in his blog. The specific abstraction between the URL and the underlying action mapping is already accomplished by using Struts. Anyway to finally get to the point, what approaches (if any) have you taken to do this in a Struts/J2EE specific way? Could a Servlet Filter be used? Throwing Apache in front of your container is not the best solution as you could be using IIS (gasp) or just serving the site from your container directly. Russell describes his approach in his Blog (http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1003728.html careful it's friken long) but it doesn't seem very clean to me. Thanks, John This communication is intended for the use of the individual(s) or entity it was addressed to and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If the reader of this transmission is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is prohibited. If you receive this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this communication from your system(s) to which it was sent and/or replicated to. (c) 2003 Sapiens Americas Corp. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
