On 8/8/05, Michael Jouravlev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 8/8/05, Christopher Marsh-Bourdon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Over the past > > six months we have been migrating our front-ends from .net to Java > > based technologies, and Struts in the main. Now a new manager has > > come on board and he wishes us to revisit the reasons why we choose > > Struts. Now I was the main instigator as I have been using Struts > > for the past 3 years and I had previously been using an in-house MVC > > (urrgh!). I like MVCs and especially Struts, mainly because it fits > > my mindset of seperation. The main critisism (and the point of this > > missive) is that the argument I keep on facing is: > > > > "JSP/HTML/XHTML is a messy mark-up. It is cumbersome to refactor and > > a bugger to work out. We could use Tapestry or JSF and forget about > > HTML." > > I would have thought that the main criticism would have been "Struts > is a simple controller framework and does not have cool drop-in web > controls or built-in DAO components, or out-of-the-box viewstate > management, or simple view/business component integration, etc.
This seems like the gist of the issue. A component framework like JSF lets you encapsulate complex layout things like a data table into a single component, or a small set of nested components (one per column, then however many you need inside each column), with the component managing the iteration -- and perhaps other details like sortable columns and filters on the rows -- versus hand-rolling the iteration with <c:forEach>, and hand coding all the <tr> and <td> elements, and tediously coding all the advanced behavior yourself, on every such table in your app. The benefits of a component approach (abstract away the nitty gritty details) are balanced by the restrictions (you can do what the component can do). For most people, that's a pretty big win for components -- but the key is that there be enough components around to meet the majority of needs (and/or it needs to be easy enough to build components that you can roll your own). JSF seems like it's on the right trajectory in this regard, given widespread adoption from tool vendors plus a growing number of component libraries. > Struts > is a strange choice of yours, considering that you moved from asp.net. > Keep in mind the timing of this decision ... three years ago, this was a "well, duh". Craig --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
