Hi Derek, >But does not writing actions imply the need for a whole >bunch of custom code ... > Yes, it does. But so far I thought that creating "serious" web-apps would not be possible without a lot of coding.
> and it does seem that DB interaction >in Cocoon requires massive amounts of engineering and >custom code - or else having to learn other, massive apps >(Hibernate, Spring, etc) before you even start. > > But my feeling is that with AJAX, this should no longer have to be the case. Think about the Database Actions in oldschool Cocoon: They are easy to use, but as soon as you wanted to do something "serious" which involved e.g. multi-page control flow, you had to drop them for something else - be it ESQL, be it Hibernate. Now with AJAX, the Server could be degraded to a relatively "simple" one-shot CRUD logic: Here is my CRUD request, validate and execute it. All multi-page, cross-dependency, etc. stuff is moving to the client since AJAX makes it possible to provides a better user experience ... >ideally drop a few >jars into the Cocoon workspace that are wrappers for whatever >external technology might be needed - and then be able to >write a few [a *few*] config files from which pretty much >*everything* is generated; > Maybe this is unrealistic with the server handling the whole control flow - but with the client drawing a whole lot of this work, could this be the revival of the original, easy-to-use Database Actions ? Imagine a scenario like this: - Create your DB Action config file for all CRUD stuff, including validation info - Create a pipeline to render XML and XHTML from the DB data - Define an interface for using the DB Action from AJAX (basically, bind request params to DB Columns/Object attributes - this might be done automatically in a "scaffolding" sense) - Create a JS function "validate( data )" from the DB Action definition, which can be used in the client to boolean-test a request before it is sent to Cocoon. This could be possible using a stylesheet on the DB Action definition. Et voila - no Java coding involved, no Flowscript, no CForms, but a simple, "no-coding" way of using Cocoon ? WDYT ? There is a catch, however- moving Control Flow to the client does not mean this work is gone. Programming an AJAX client is still a tedious task, but out of the scope of Cocoon, IMHO. > Just a dream - maybe.... > :-) Just some ideas ... Johannes --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
