I tend to give just the opposite answer :)
I agree that frames can be difficult in a number of ways, however, once you get a handle on them it's really not a big deal to deal with. More importantly, depending on your application, you may find that performance is significantly increased.
Also, with frames you can do some tricks that you can't do otherwise. For instance, having a hidden frame with cached data and Javascript cuntions can be incredibly powerful. You can boost perforance by not sending that stuff down with every request, lower the load on your server and make your user interface more robust.
What are some of the difficulties? Navigation can be tricky to deal with because the user can ultimately control each frame independently. Also, simply bookmarking a site can sometimes be diffcult depending on how you've architected things. Automated load testing can also be complicated by frames, as can things like periodic checks of whether an app is up or not.
In short, if the parts of the UI you don't think will change much doesn't contain too much, I'd say go with tiles because you probably won't benefit very much from frames. If however the contents of those parts is significant, and/or you can see the need for caching data and common code, frames can be very powerful. There is a common bias, as Luiz demonstrates, against frames, and certainly tiles is more common in the Struts world, but I really believe this is more out of force of habit than real tangible reasons. Some people get burnt by frames early on and never want to touch them again (I can certainly understand that). And sometimes frames will simply make your life more difficult, so you do have to make the decision properly. But don't discard frames simply because it's not the "Struts way". Make the decision, as you should any other, on what will truly suit your needs best.
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
Luiz Esmiralha wrote:
Hi Nadia,
I would bet on tiles. I avoid frames like the plague, for many reasons. So, use tiles. It's the struts way of doing what you want. A great tutorial on tiles: http://www.arc-mind.com/papers/advanced-tiles.pdf
Best regards, Luiz Esmiralha
On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 14:43:44 -0500, Nadia Kunkov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi, This is a struts newbie question. I'm building an application with the following layout:
------------------------------------------------------------ | Some header | | ------------------------------------------------------------ M | | E | | N | target | U | | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------
The menu would be painted once at the login, so will the header. The only changing content is in the target. Which approach would be the least painful for me to implement - frames or tiles or both? What is the best practices approach? Could you point me to some examples of a struts app with tiles/frames? Thanks for your help NK
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