The current convention of Webware development is making it difficult to distribute or reuse servlets.
It's expected that many pages will not be reusable -- they'll be tied into their applications, calling all sorts of methods that are specific to that application. But most useful servlets have to tie into *something*, even if they could be reused. In the case of users, it's an issue of tying into the (presumably) application-specific definition of a user, authentication, etc. We need ways to provide application-specific information to potentially generic servlets (like a login page). There is also the matter of site look. Again, many of us are handling our site look through inheritance -- overriding writeBodyParts or otherwise putting the site look in the SitePage. Again, the generic servlet needs some way to access this information. Lastly, there's the matter of specializing the generic servlet, which is really just another way of looking at the other two issues, though in this case there's the presumption that the servlet has a basic understanding of what to do, but you want to change that. Inheritance just doesn't work for this kind of reuse. It's onerous to change the inheritance structure of the generic servlet, because that involves editing the actual servlet code, making it no longer generic. Mixins, in my experience, can be very difficult to work with -- the semantics of who's method gets called where can get very confusing. It's also hard to use more than one mixin at the same time, they just aren't gentle with each other. So, I'm hoping people can give ideas of new things we can do with servlets to make this work. I think this an important underlying reason that we aren't seeing a lot of servlet-like code being shared among Webware users. Ian ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Etnus, makers of TotalView, The debugger for complex code. Debugging C/C++ programs can leave you feeling lost and disoriented. TotalView can help you find your way. Available on major UNIX and Linux platforms. Try it free. www.etnus.com _______________________________________________ Webware-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss
