--On Freitag, 13. Mai 2005 12:07 Uhr +0200 Sylvain Wallez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
3 years ago, the cocoon devs were discussing "flow maps", and addition to the sitemap to define page flow using an XML grammar. We always ended up with verbose XML languages having control structures (the infamous "if"), and then some people came with continuations, at first is Scheme (a Lisp dialect - eck!) and then Javascript, and later pure Java.
Having a real programming language allow to *very easily* write complex page flows, as you can use all the language's features for control structures, and simply use regular variables to store the interaction state. Amazingly easy and powerful.
The main advandage I see to a declarative approach is that it allows to build visual tools (i.e. graphical editors) to design the flow. But the underlying XML files are very likely to be a real mess in realworld complex use cases.
Note however that Cocoon's flow engine is pluggable and that we have 3 versions of it today: - flowscript, using Javascript to define the flow (business logic should be kept in Java) - javaflow, a pure java implementation - apples, an experimental implementation (used in Daisy IIRC) which may be actually closer to Spring's approach.
as i understood it the results of a flowscript-operation don't generate sax-events. so you can use flowscript only at the end of a pipeline. is that true? and is it equally true for all 3 flow-implementations mentioned above? in that case i would think that some logic within the sitemap (the infamous "if") wouldn't be so bad (for very comlex problems one could still decide to leave the sax-stream and use flows). but i might very well overlook something obvious or essential.
thanks for your time, thomas
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