----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank W. Zammetti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Tomcat Users List" <users@tomcat.apache.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 10:10 PM
Subject: Re: Struts vs JSF (poll?)
Being as most of what I do today is RIA development, I've personally
found that the ideal solution is to use NO framework at all. I use DWR
and just treat everything as method calls.
The nice thing about that is you wind up with a very clean and "plain"
structure to your application in the sense that you're thinking in terms
of classes and methods, like you do in general server-side anyway. It
also makes most of your application highly testable (except where
session comes into play, but we tend to try and minimize that usage
anyway). You design a proper API, and the fact that you're using it
behind a web-based application isn't really relevant (and in fact you
can truly slap any front-end on you want without much trouble).
I've found that my projects drift towards more of a component-based
model naturally doing this, and away from the classic page/action-based
model of Struts (which is where we were a few years ago). It becomes
much more about events, small, focused bits of functionality, and how
it's all put together to form a larger whole. The development cycle I
find is much faster, much simpler and the results are far more flexible
and extensible. It's in some sense a return to a more "bare metal"
mentality, but it's truly made our lives a whole lot better. I've had
to mentor some pretty inexperienced teams and I've seen this approach
versus the framework-centric approach with something like Struts, and
I've observed it to be much easier to get their brains wrapped around
this approach, they come up to speed and are effective faster, and they
are more effective than in cases where a full, "proper" framework was
used.
So, if the question is Struts vs. JSF, I'm in agreement with Johnny to a
large degree: neither is the best answer. And in fact, I second the "no
framework at all" opinion. I suppose if you wanted to consider DWR a
framework then I'd say DWR, but it's really just a mechanism, not a
framework (it could be something else other than DWR, so long as it
presented an RPC view of the world it'd be the same basically). But as
far as the "true" frameworks go, as we've come to understand them over
the past few years, my personal opinion is that they serve no purpose
any longer when talking about developing modern RIAs, and in fact tend
to get in the way more than they help in those situations. I completely
realize this isn't the popular opinion (yet), and many people actually
disagree quite vehemently, but I've had pretty extensive experience
building these types of apps for nearly 10 years now, and that's the
mindset I've come to at this point.
(I tend not to say this often, because it's usually annoying to me when
people do it, but what the hell... I actually blogged about this a
little while back: http://www.zammetti.com/blog)
Frank
Yes, exactly... the closer you get to the plain TC MVC model (its a
technique not a framework), the smaller, cleaner, faster, and easier to
understand... the code becomes.
Then what you'll find is that if you need Ajax, you may give DWR a go, or
anything else... and then if your client comes back and says, we need a
special wiki with a search engine... you not going to panic because its not
in the framework... you going dig around in Apache, find some cool stuff
like lucene... and just do it.
Its a model... and once you get it, you'll actually start to see it in all
these other tools...
I actually think there is no short cut to just trying to understand all the
core technologies...
I kick consultants out regularly ;) If the guy start waffling on about VWP,
but he doesnt understand HTML... I classify him as damn dangerous ;)
Have fun...
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Well done China... that was cool
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