Back to the (rephrased) question - The Oracle ADF framework uses a twist
on the DynaForm idea. There is (generally) only one ActionForm in an
Application which is configured at runtime based on an XML bindings file
which describes exactly what data is required for this particular page.
The binding file is in the format proposed by JSR-277
<http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=227> and acts as the abstraction
between the model and the view. The view layer is ignorant of what the
actual source of the data for the form is, be it EJB, a WebService,
TopLink, a POJO or whatever. The JSR 227 metadata describes and service
in the common terms of available collections and methods. The
implementing framework handles the resource management and DTO
functionality between the layers.
To the page programmer the data for the page is just made available on
the request as a "bindings" object and can be accessed through JSTL or
Struts Tags. Likewise the service coder is ignorant of the consumer of
the data. The JSR-227 bindings are the same across multiple UI's Swing,
JSP/Struts and JSF and the UI developer's gestures for consuming data
in the IDE are identical in each case.
Not everyone's cup of tea I know but it does remove a huge amount of
boilerplate plumbing from code.
Duncan
Rick Reumann wrote:
Rick Reumann wrote the following on 7/12/2005 11:45 AM:
One thing I didn't bring up, though, because I'm not sure how 'best
practice' it is, is the concept of passing your ActionForm and
sometimes the HttpServletRequest off to another class for some
processing.
Just realized, thanks to Dave pointing it out, that I DID NOT MEAN
another 'layer' in the sense of a design layer as in the "model" or
"view". Layer was a very, very, very poor term to use.
I sure hope people don't think I was advocating passing struts objects
to the model *layer* or anything along those lines.
I should have restated the subject as "How often do you create Helper
classes that your Actions use" or something along those lines.
Sorry for all the confusion. (Wish I could go back an edit the subject
heading:)
--
Regards
Duncan Mills
Senior Principal Product Manager
Oracle Application Development Tools
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
