RE: IBM not investing in i5/OS was: iSociety

From: Aaron Bartell

--- Deep linking ---
Let's say you wanted to send an order receipt email confirmation to
customers and you wanted to provide them a link to get right to that exact
order from the email. How would you do this with EGL? JSF is HTTP POST
driven (i.e. it ignores everything after '?' in the URL). Deeplinking is
fundemental IMO.

First, I'm going to address the silliness of this. This has nothing to do
with an ERP application. You're talking about bookmarking. Bookmarking has
positive and negative aspects, and most applications I see don't need it.

Now, that being said, the lack of deeplinking is a weakness, but it's not an
unbeatable flaw. You can easily create a small front-end servlet whose job
is to pass deeplinks on to the appropriate JSF page. What's really nice
about this approach is that it allows you to have a centralized traffic cop.

Now, you won't like this solution because it doesn't fit some arbitrary
checkmark you read on the Internet, but the truth is, what percentage of
your pages do you need to be deeplinked? It's a nice to have, not a show
stopper, and there's a workaround.

--- Back button ---
This is one that I don't entirely understand, but am guessing it has to do
with the JSF lifecycle. Using the back button, while saving state on the
server side, will cause the user to have to click a commandLink twice for
it to successfully execute. Would you be able to publish one of your CRUD
apps on the internet so I can see if IBM's EGL has the issues I have
experienced?

<LOL!>

No, I'm not going to publish an app for you to test on! Gz, Aaron! Write
your own and let us know the problem!

--- dynamic download of a file ---
You said this wasn't fair game, I disagree. Downloading files from an
online application is fundemental no matter how you slice it. Many times
you don't just want to give them deep link access to the file even it
statically exists on the filesystem.

Deeplink, not deeplink, you're insatiable. <grin> Me, I write this as a
separate non-JSF page.

I am sure you have heard of Matt Raible (he's on the JSF expert team among
many others). Some of his opinions of JSF match mine. Notice that both
of us still use JSF. We aren't saying that because we found flaws it is
completely useless. Instead we are critisizing the framework so people
KNOW what they are getting themselves into.

Well, I'll let you and Matt know when I run into problems.

<grin>

Joe