I believe it's needed in order to get the various methods called within the JSF life-cycle... such as the use of prerender.
>From the Shale http://struts.apache.org/shale/features.html#view
Rick's got it right ... AbstractViewController is primarily about enabling support for the extra lifecycle callbacks -- something that you'd do with annotations in Beehive or Struts Ti (and is essentially the strategy EJB3 is using to get rid of the requirement to implement specific platform APIs), where they declare JDK 1.5 as the base platform. Since I want Shale to work on JDK 1.4 I don't get to use that kind of capabiity.
A couple of other notes:
* Use of "extends AbstractViewController" or "implements ViewController"
is entirely optional ... pure JSF backing beans will still work in a Shale based
application, but you won't get the benefit of the extra lifecycle callbacks.
* AbstractViewController also includes a host of other utility methods that can
make programming a backing bean easier.
Craig
