Re: In significant need of help. -- JAVA400-L

"gotten us as close to MVC as possible"

Probably the "us" is the important qualifier here Joe. I have seen plenty of jsp and other code over the past couple of years and every implementation is different. Some are more MVC, some are less. That probably reflects the skills and previous programming orientation of the programmer.

Me, I am a "seat of the pants" programmer who basically grew up on RPG (and probably more VB and .asp than I care to admit to...) But, what I REALLY liked about the first interactive RPG program I wrote was that there was this "magic" built into the structure. If I had a file with three fields, FLDA and FLDB and FLDC and I wanted to read and write that to a screen all I needed to do in SDA was to have a screen format that had the same field names and characteristics and, viola! Done! I read the file format, write the screen format, then read the screen format and write to the file. (I THINK that is the correct sequence). All the data movement intricacies were taken care of (yeah, lots of editing needed to be done, but I learned some of that the hard way...)

In any case, when I decided to move to HTML I looked for something that worked the same way. I wanted to retrieve the screen format (HTML), retrieve the data and write the whole thing out and FreeMarker was the first thing I tripped across that did that. I didn't have to worry about much on the client side, HTML or otherwise. No taglib references, no other components to worry about. The server does the heavy lifting and sends out the HTML. You're right, Freemarker isn't smart about HTML at all, it just slavishly reads the HTML template, replaces the field "markers" with data and outputs it. At that point the output is sent it to the HTTP server. You could just as easily output to a report in PDF if you wanted to. It is just a templating tool.

I really liked the simplicity though: Just an HTML template to mark up (like my SDA example). Just expose the data to the HTML form. Output the result.

OK. That is a simple explanation. I know that JSP's do something similar and, when properly implemented, can actually be maintained over time. With FM I can have a web designer design the page without any knowledge of how it will be used by the server. I can replace the text fields with my field markers that refer to the servlet data and it is ready for Freemarker. Again, that is greatly simplified but it matches the model I am familiar with.

If I have learned anything over the years, regardless of the "right solution", one programmer's delight is another one's nemesis. Variety is the spice of life.

Pete

Joe Pluta wrote:

I find this statement interesting, Pete.  Why do you consider FreeMarker
more MVC than JSP?  With a properly written JSP, all the model
information is passed via beans, and the JSP simply displays them.  Why
is this less MVC than FreeMarker?  FreeMarker is just a text generator,
sort of like XSLT, and as such isn't very smart about things like HTML.
You have to actually embed your HTML code in the FreeMarker template,
which makes it roughly equivalent to a JSP (except interpreted).
Joe
From: Pete Helgren
JSP's kind of muddy the waters between client side and server side so perhaps there
is
a way with JSP's to do this.
I am by no means an experienced .jsp programmer. We moved to
FreeMarker

so we could avoid JSP's. Freemarker, being a server side engine has gotten us a close to MVC as possible....but I am digressing here.