Hi folks, This isn't your usual "How do I do X?" type question so get ready. Hopefully it will fuel a good discussion. I'm fairly new to struts but have a solid grasp of Model 2 design ideas. The problem, I suppose, is that I am a lone developer (for my own company) which makes it hard to get the balanced view of the technology arena that is aquired through working with other developers. Therefore I have a couple of high level architecture questions that I am interested to hear your views on.
The current application that I am working on uses XSLT to generate web pages. As you wold expect a bunch of beans (and some other objects) get converted into XML, run against a stylesheet and out pops a page. This is fine and the application uses a good dose of Model 2 goodness so it's easy to manage and extend. Unfortunately, it has been developed with it's own MVC framework. I would like to convert it to use Struts but I don't want to throw away the flexibility given by using XSLT. Whoa. Before you all shout "But Struts can use any technology for the view look at stxx" I have had a look at it and stxx has the smell of death around it. As far as I can tell it has been abandoned and doesn't support Struts 1.2.x (the front page hasn't been updated in well over a year). Further more it is fairly obvious that Struts was designed with JSP in mind and while it may work with XSLT my experience of other technologies is that this type of usage with not be easy or pleasant. You are probably wondering by now why I even want to use XSLT rather than JSP. The reason is simple. XSLT provides a huge amount of flexibility and the cleanest separation of the view that I have found. I admit that it is a little more work to create a stylesheet rather than a JSP but I feel that is worth it. I'm not 100% dead set on using XSLT. I have learnt that it is generally not a good idea to go against the grain and if the arguments are compelling enough I will switch to JSP. The problem I have with JSP is that with every release it feels like it gets closer to XSLT. A site I recently developed using JSF + JSP 2.0 (jspx) felt like the pages were nothing more than dumbed down stylesheets. My other concern is that Struts 2.x seems to be heading towards total integration with JSF. While I love the simplicity of JSF and the speed with which one can create a web application it is unsuitable for use on an ecommerce site where the users are expected to be able to bookmark pages (using a refresh is a poor hack IMHO) and, more importantly, robots can't navigate JSF sites. A combination of technologies could be used but that then multiplies the cost of development and maintenance. Finally then the questions. * Should I just stop fighting city hall and abandon XSLT in favour of JSP? * Perhaps it's still a little early to say exactly how Struts 2.x will turn out but will the idea of view technology independence be maintained? * If Struts 2.x doesn't (essentiall) force us to use something akin to JSF will XSLT still be a viable option? Thanks for reading this far. I really look forward to hearing your views. Graham --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
