RE: EARs and Jars continued

> From: David Morris
>
> One way to avoid this with Struts is to generate your
> JSP pages using something like Velocity. Relying on
> JSP is Struts weak point. There are better tools,  than Velocity like
> Jelly, XMLC, and XSLTC but Velocity is the most widely used and
> simplest.

Have you looked at all at the Eclipse GMT project?  I also understand there
is a similar MDA (Model Driven Architecture) movement over at OMG, but the
OMG website is pretty difficult to navigate and besides, it seems like you
need to be a member to see much of anything.

But the GMT project is, like many things Eclipse-related, Open Source.  The
idea is to define architectures at a completely platform independent level
and then, through translations, get them to platform specific code.  It
seems like it might be a viable front-end to Struts/JSF/Whatever-Comes-Next.
Especially since the idea is to also be able to generate other UI
representations.

Finally, there's a couple of small (as in one-person, AFAIK) projects for
creating XML front ends for SWT.  I want to see if I can devise a higher
level ML that would translate to either XSWT or a JSP syntax such as Jelly.


> I don't know about a Maven plug-in for Eclipse, but I
> would wager that one will come along soon. Even
> though Maven is still beta, it is widely used and
> does work as advertised.

There's still the issue of what IBM plans to do.  Not only that, as a
community we STILL need to figure out how to extend the J2EE deployment
model to support OS/400 concepts such as licensed programs.  As far as I'm
concerned, the business logic of any of my business applications is still
going to be written in RPG, and probably be keyed by CPU.  There's no
support, or even hooks for supporting, anything like that in EAR/WAR.  And
that's what I hate about it - not only is the model primitive, but it's
non-extensible.  That makes it less than suitable for OS/400 applications.

Joe