RE: EARs and Jars continued

Joe,

I share your concerns with Craig's statements. The 
biggest chunk of time and biggest risk with using 
custom tags is that the tags will become obsolete 
and there is no abstraction layer that insulates you 
from this. Hand coding JSP pages is like hand coding 
DDS, it is slow and is guaranteed to become obsolete. 

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.

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.

David Morris

>>> joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 05/30/03 10:13 AM >>>
> From: David Morris
>
> The functionality you describe is provided by Maven, which is open
> source
> and free. Most of the Jakarta projects are moving to Maven which uses
> a project description to define the relationships between various
> project
> files. You can find out more at: http://maven.apache.org/

It looks interesting David.  I didn't see any indication of plans for an
Eclipse plug-in, however.  So lacking that, this is a separate external
step.  So do I now abandon WDSC as my delivery mechanism and standardize
on
a non-Eclipse solution?  What happens then if and when WDSC does decide
to
include these features?

The world of Open Source, even within the Jakarta domain, is a scary
one.
Pick the wrong standard, and you could be tool.  Look at Struts - how
compatible will it be with the new JavaServer Faces?  According to the
Struts/JSF man himself:

"In my JavaOne BOF on Struts (March, 2002), I made the statement that
Struts
would have a very clean integration with JSF, so that you can use JSF
components in your user interface, but continue to use the controller,
Actions, and associated business logic. Indeed, I stated that it will be
possible to transition your application from using Struts HTML tags to
using
Faces component tags, one page at a time -- in most cases, with zero
changes
to the business logic or Action classes and minimal changes to the
<forward>
elements in your struts-config.xml configuration file."

"in most cases" "possible" "transition" "one page at a time"

Sure sounds like a rewrite to me.  And I want to avoid something like
that
with deployment like the plague.  The last thing I want is to have to
revamp
my deployment process.

But still, I like what the Maven folks are doing.  It bears watching
with
interest.

Joe