Comments on: CHoosing a front-end tech

By: Daniel Sheppard

Daniel Sheppard — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 09:43:37 +0000

In terms of the actual template/page renderer, have a look at Freemarker (http://freemarker.sf.net). I’ve been using that rather than JSP lately, and I’m quite liking it - much more intuitive than jsp. Similar to velocity, but much more powerful and flexible.

You can definitely use freemarker within a struts environment. I’m not very familiar with webwork and tapestry, but you might be able to use it there as well.

By: Dan Campers

Dan Campers — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 23:20:47 +0000

Spring framework also has a nice MVC part to it amongst other things. www.springframework.com and http://www.springframework.org/docs/MVC-step-by-step/Spring-MVC-step-by-step.html

By: Howard M. Lewis Ship

Howard M. Lewis Ship — Sun, 12 Oct 2003 23:19:49 +0000

Tapestry has changed overwhelmingly in the last year; the 3.0 version (now in late beta) is worth a new look … everything is simplified and streamlined without sacrificing power. You can do a *lot* more in your HTML templates, almost like a JSP, but cleaner … and you have the option to do less in the JSP as you wrap your brain around Tapestry and the advantages of seperating concerns. I’m very proud of what’s happened to the code over the last year or so, and of how far the team has come as well.

Work on the Tapestry in Action book is winding down, at which point I’ll be able to fill in the gaps in the free documentation and push Tapestry to a 3.0 GA release.

By: domagoj

domagoj — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 05:58:47 +0000

Projects:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/echo
http://sourceforge.net/projects/echopoint

they are like JSF or Tapestry (real components) but much more like Swing and not mind bending like Tapestry.

By: On XSP etc

On XSP etc — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 05:47:10 +0000

I think XSP’s are nasty vicious things, but I still like Cocoon a lot. If maximizing performance is not of prime importance I use Velocity in Cocoon. Unfortunately, XSP’s provide about a two to fourfold speed improvement over Velocity in Cocoon as Cocoon feels the need to convert everything to SAX events.

By: Hoy Palloy

Hoy Palloy — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 04:16:24 +0000

How about using the tagbox project from sourceforge to generate the xml then xslt for html transformation - nice and clean.

By: Jason Carreira

Jason Carreira — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 07:24:11 +0000

If you need interceptors in your web app to modularize your code, but don’t want to go for AOP yet, check out WebWork2…. You can apply Interceptors to command processing, and this is in fact how much of the functionality is implemented (and can be plugged in piecemeal).

By: bayard

bayard — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 06:54:25 +0000

Oh, on the logic comment.

I want to plug the logic in as interceptors. Basic concepts should exist by default, CRUD stuff, searching/filtering. I should then be able to plug bits into those concepts by interception/pluggability. I also should be able to write new concepts, like ’subscribe’ and ‘login’.

Maybe HiveMind/AOP are a possible. Interceptors appear to be terms I hear a lot in those areas.

By: bayard

bayard — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 06:51:57 +0000

Back when I was messing with these ideas a while back, we used Cocoon 1 on a project. It connected nicely onto the front of the system, but XSP/XSLT was not the nicest language, and a bit new to everyone then. Maybe trying Cocoon again is the way to go.

By: bayard

bayard — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 06:50:27 +0000

Being able to pass the objects from Hibernate into the JSTL is nice, but I’d not want to bother with Struts just to call the store method [and other transaction bits]. But good point, Hibernate’s style means that the taglib needs to just be a pretty basic setup.