In a nutshell and in my own words, Crysalis (http://chrysalis.sourceforge.net/) has the underlying idea that when you develop in most MVC frameworks, Struts chief among them, you are actually doing something unnatural and in a way at odds with basic OOP design.
Think about a shopping cart example... If you were going to write that in straight Java, not for the web or anything, how would you model it? Most likely you would have a ShoppingCart class with a number of methods in it, things like addItem(), removeItem(), totalPrice(), etc.
In Struts, although you aren't FORCED to, what you GENERALLY do is create three different Action classes like addItemAction, removeItemAction and totalPriceAction, and each is called in response to a form submission.
But isn't it kind of odd that your object model isn't following what you probably think in your head is the right way, i.e., one class with multiple related methods? Proper encapsulation and all that jazz, right?
Well, Crysalis does just that. It's controller elements are regular Java classes with multiple methods. What you wind up with is something that resembles Remote Procedure Calls instead of numerous servlets as controllers.
In other words, you would create the ShoppingCart object just as I described above, with all three methods. Then, when you submit a form, the action is something along the lines of "ShoppingCart.addItem.cmd". ShoppingCart is the class to execute, addItem the method and cmd is a suffix to direct the request, just like extensions in your Struts apps map requests to ActionServlet.
The elements of the submitted form are treated as the parameters of the method being called, making it rather elegant.
I haven't gotten into any real detail on Crysalis, but I was interested in getting other peoples' thoughts on the underlying principal (which I *THINK* I've stated properly!). It was rather interesting to me because I'd never reall considered looking at it that way, and certainly it's not the way you typically approach a Struts-based application. It was also interesting to me because I've for about four years now been preaching here at work that we should write our applications as a collection of services that are executed to form a coherent larger application, which is very much along the lines of this (so I guess I actually HAVE looked at it this way in a sense, but not exactly).
Any thoughts?
Frank
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