We are also working with Struts in a banking application. In our case the requeriment was to have skinning capabilities, so we develop a framework to manage skins and then open sourced it to Xkins (http://xkins.sourceforge.net/)
Our approach is to determine the pieces of the UI. We create a mock page with all posible combinations and people from graphic designs create that mock page with all UI elemens. Then, we extract this pieces of pages to Xkin templates and use taglibs to decorate struts tags in the JSP pages. These taglibs uses xkins templates. When we need to change a style or a piece of HTML, we just change the Xkin template. And additionally, if we need other skin, we create a new one and the application looks completely different. Of course, the secret is to determine the "pieces" so that you always can compose your pages. Xkins has also XkinsForms that has an implementation of this idea that you could use and extend to add your own templates. Xkins templates uses Velocity and you could use other template languages like groovy or JByte. HTH Cheers. Guillermo. >-- Mensaje original -- >Reply-To: "Struts Users Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Struts development methodology >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >From: Victor Grazi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:28 -0400 > > >We are developing an important struts application for a major bank, and we > >need some advice on methodology... >Our graphic designers are developing the UI in HTML using Dreamweaver and > >Notepad. (They are gifted artists, but they don't much know about Struts >or >JSTL). >We also have Java developers who are concurrently creating the Struts >pieces. > >Question is - how do you synch up the work of these 2 teams? >One approach would be to give the Java team the html pages and have them > >translate the tags to struts. However this becomes difficult to maintain, > >because if the graphics team makes a few small changes, the entire page >needs to be retranslated to struts. > >Another approach would be to download a Dreamweaver plugin such as FWA >Visual Struts. We tested that approach and we were actually able to get the > >tags to render in Dreamweaver. However the artists always need to view the > >pages in MS Internet Explorer before signing off, and since the Java >classes don't exist yet, they can't do that. > >We considered another approach where we would create an XSLT transform to > >transform the html pages to a struts equivalent, and embed struts specific > >info into the document using some tags that would not be recognizable to > >the browser. However this is difficult since there is not really a 1 to 1 > >correspondence between tags and attributes. > >Ok, so those were our ideas, none of them great. >So can you give us any advice? > >Thanks, >Victor > > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ________________________________________ FiberTel, el nombre de la banda ancha http://www.fibertel.com.ar --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
