This'll probably start a flamewar but I'm in exactly the same position. I'm
also torn between the two. I want very much to use Turbine. I've been
lurking on this list for months and playing with Turbine but I've come to
the conclusion that I'm going to use Struts. Here's the reasons:
- We're a WebSphere shop. We're building an enterprise infrastructure
including scalability and security. It ties into WebSphere, Tivoli, etc.
Turbine is not setup to use anything other then its own internal security
and database pool.
- We're a straight IT shop, not a web or product shop. We get body shop
people for many tasks and its hard enough to get quality people let alone
train them on Velocity / Turbine. Using a "standard" like JSP helps to
minimize the training and learning curve problem. You can use JSP with
Turbine but as every person who asks a JSP question on the list can tell
you, its not well supported.
- Struts is extremely simple to explain and use and performs very well.
Turbine is very complex. I can easily tweak a Struts app logical flow
without recompiling and I don't have to track the latest libraries.
- Struts is very stable. My biggest problem with Turbine is that its a
constantly moving target. The older versions don't meet my requirements and
the development version is moving too fast to use (not that that one meets
all my requirements either).
- And as a very small nit, you can use normal URLs with Struts. I'm sorry
but telling people to use mod_rewrite is not a solution. I need to be able
to field an installation package to multiple servers w/o having people
fiddle around with Apache. It's hard enough getting things through QA onto
the production boxes as it is.
What Struts is (primarily) missing is:
- Layouts
- Services
- Database layer
- Security
Security is a wash, I have to authenticate using WebSphere's security to get
single sign-on regardless of the approach I take.
It's (relatively) easy to write a JNDI datasource object for Turbine but I
can't easily rip out the security framework. I'm also not sure about the
Criteria approach. Instead I'll adapt an extremely simple generator I wrote
that produces code very similar to the Peers system. I've also looked very
hard at Castor but I've got problems with its cacheing approach and startup
times.
The services I mostly like but I'll end up writing a simple system to
replace that as well. I don't need most of the complexity in the services
framework and I want to simplify the logic. If you add service
dependendency you really don't need the whole early initialization thing.
Layouts and Velocity I'll simply miss. I really, really like Velocity and
the Turbine layout system. It's simple, easy and powerful. None of my JSP
alternatives appeal to me. Instead I'll be relying on JSP includes.
Ted Wise
>From: "Chris Kmiec" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: turbine vs. struts
>Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 20:51:57
>
>I am in charge of architecting a little web system which will use some of
>the jakarta components. I am torn between using Struts and Turbine. I am
>wondering if maintaining Velocity templates will be more difficult than
>just
>using straight JSPs with Struts. I want to come up with a solid, scaleable
>architecture. Any suggestions? Opinions? Pros and cons for either solution?
>
>Thanks!
>--Chirs
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