Re: MVC Approach

Larry & Kristen,

There is a lot of interest in this area, and frontending Web 
services with Struts is becoming more popular. Struts is an 
excellent choice for Java Web applications because it has 
momentum and is pretty simple. I do think that a new 
architecture that used today's technologies could be better, 
but there is risk associated with a mixed message.

For example, a better architecture might be one that 
combined Axis and Jelly. Combined these two are much more 
flexible than Struts and have some major advantages. First, 
integration would be built in. Second, you could write the view 
or model with .net or Java. Third, Jelly has built in state-based 
workflow that could be used to support a very flexible controller.

Jelly does avoid most of the XML parsing overhead and can be 
used to "transform" output. A while back, I penciled out a design 
and would be happy to share the ideas if anyone is interested in 
actually creating this sort of open source project.

David Morris

>>> klhnry@xxxxxxxxxxxx 03/19/03 08:33AM >>>
One observation is that there is quite a lot of system overhead when
using XML parsing in general, including web services.

Kristen

Larry wrote:

> Struts seems to be one of the best ways to incorporate the MVC
pattern into one's web application design.  I have some struts
applications running on our public sites.
>
> But with all the Web Services buzz going on, might another paradigm
for an MVC-like approach be to design all of your interactive access as
web services (Axis, whatever) and then use a presentation layer like JSP
to present you dynamic content on pretty web pages, perhaps with some
XSL translation going on.
>
> Then, sophisticated end users (customers) could access your dynamic
content directly by interfacing to the web service directly using the
WSDL specification.  Or they can still access data by a browser.  Either
way, all output is coming from one source.
>
> Any comments?  I am just ruminating this stuff over in my head and
would appreciate any thoughts.
>
> Larry