Re: Struts

First off, Pete, recognize that I'm not a big fan of frameworks in general.
Many of them do the 80% of the 80/20 rule and leave the hard stuff for the
programmer.  In the worst cases, they lock you in so that it's very
difficult to get that 20% done, which is turn reduces the usefulness of the
framework.

JSF is an extremely ugly framework.  However, it does work pretty well with
tools, and WDSC has some really nice tools to make JSF design simple and
painless.  However, I'm still in the 80% stage; I will be trying the other
20% over the coming weeks.

My primary caveat is that I'm using EGL as my interface language.  EGL makes
it almost ridiculously easy to create a form or a table by just adding a
bunch of fields to a Record, and then dropping the Record (or an array of
records) it onto a JSF page.  In fact, check my recent MC article to see
just how easy it is to use it ... including to an RPG back end.

http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc?1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@.6b3a121c

For my next article, I'll be hitting the 20% hard: adding computed columns
to tables, adding images, nesting and rearranging forms, and of course
integrating with Ajax.  But if EGL passes that particular test, I'll be very
interested in it as a standard development tool for iSeries web access.

Joe

From: Pete Helgren

What, specifically, would you recommend to replace Struts?  We have
invested quite a bit of time in developing a framework around Struts and
this isn't the first time you have mentioned that it was passe'. Not
that I want to throw out our investment in Struts or start going mano a
mano over Struts (I prefer Freemarker myself).  I truly would be
interested in knowing your thoughts, pros and cons, about Struts.

My primary beef was that the "configuration file madness" around that
framework.  Seemed to me that most of the heartburn was getting the
proper xml files updated (perhaps that would be mitigated by a better
plugin in Eclipse).  What would you use as an alternative and why? (if
you don't mind me asking)

Pete