The latest buzzword being tossed around lately is RIA, Rich Internet
Applications. Some of us laugh at the term because we've been doing
RIA's for 5+ years now and never thought to attach a special term to it
:) But I digress...
It's true that Struts doesn't have any built-in provisions for
event-driven web development, but it does nothing to stop you from
implementing it yourself. I mean, in the end, ASP.Net, JSF, Shale, the
work of Michael Jouravlev, and all the other contenders are doing
exactly that... it's still HTTP underneath it all.
What does the event-driven model offer you? It allows you to build
webapps that are much more like fat-client apps in terms of how they
work and how the user interacts with it.
We're far enough along in things that we can now differentiate two types
of webapps... one is the "classic" model, as I like to call it... this
is the "fill in some form fields, click a button, wait for a new page to
appear" model. This served us well for a couple of years, but even from
the beginning you could see that is was a step back from what we were
used to in terms of native apps. There just wasn't much choice... we
didn't yet know how to do anything else!
Now we're moving on to the RIA's... these are applications that don't
necessarily flow from page to page, instead the user can navigate them
at will, more or less. "Events" that occur on the client-side don't
automatically have to result in a whole new page being rendered (and
this DOES NOT require AJAX, the other buzzword of the day, although it
is one good way to achieve the result).
As I said at the beginning, Struts doesn't offer this capability
natively, but it does nothing to stop you from doing it yourself. At
the end of the day, an event-driven model is more about a conceptual
approach than it is concrete techniques. Don't view your webapp as a
series of pages. Instead, view it as a collection of loosely-coupled
"services" that you nit together to form a whole. You've probably
heaard the term SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture... usually this
refers to Web Services, but you can create a SOA-based single
application just as well.
Web development is going to continue to march more and more towards the
RIA model of things. It's pretty much inevitable in my view. People
are just now putting forth a number of different ways to get there, and
it will be interesting to see which ones survive the shakedown period...
I'm not sure it's fair to say that Struts lack of a true event model is
a weakness... it simply wasn't a coherent concept when Struts was created.
Frank
Yuniar Setiawan wrote:
Hi there,
I've just read "Struts in Action" and found that one of struts weakness is
"no event model", means "Struts is tightly coupled with the
request-response model used by HTTP, this can be restricting to developers
used to finely grained events"
I've found all about this event model in JSF too. What I don't really
understand is, why do we really need event model for web application? Isn't
it suitable for desktop application? do we expected to code web application
like VB or delphi or others?
What's event model offered?
Thanks in advance
YNR
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