On 9/10/05, Frank W. Zammetti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Craig McClanahan wrote: > > I hope you'll find my comments useful in furthering this kind of > discussion. > > But I'm starting from a different place than you ... I personally think > it > > is a waste of time to improve the tools and documentation support for a > five > > year old architecture that is definitely showing its age. > > Craig, I've heard you make this statement a couple of times... can you > go into some detail on where and how Struts is "showing its age"?
Here's a couple of things that (had we known then what we know now) would very likely be different -- and areas where I think improvements would be helpful: * Actions as stateless singletons, instead of per-request instances * Form beans (should have done it the way WebWork does) * Extensibility of request processor (getting fixed in 1.3) * Action chaining is messed up. * Decorating actions (a la Spring MVC or WebWork or Tapestry) is missing * Expression language syntax (based on BeanUtils) is way too limited * Totally dependent on Servlet API objects, making (a) unit tests hard, and (b) implementations on portlet difficult * Key functional areas (such as Tiles and Validator) can be pretty obtuse to configure * No model of user interface components -- just hard coded HTML rendering None of these things are totally unusable -- but they all need improvement. Craig
