I'm still working on externally facing applications. The company has a few different types of user that it supports (Members who receive services, Providers who provide the services, Brokers who sell the service, and Clients that pay for their members to receive services). Each of these audiences has their own web site to support their needs. Up to about 4 months ago, each of these sites was written in it's own, home-grown framework which effectively prevented developers from one team helping out any of the other teams.
So, recently I had the opportunity to try out a few different technology stacks to try and pick one for the company. I started with Struts 1 and we wrote a successful externally facing application that was well received and most of the people that are maintaining it haven't had any problems. Next I wrote a Struts 1/Tiles 1 application that had a strict internationalization requirement (since it had to support multiple languages from day 1). That also went very well and has been an easy maintainence platform. After that I wrote my first Struts 2 app (with Spring and Acegi security). I fell in love with the new controller, but I'm still a bit disappointed in the view. Struts 2 definitely has a steeper learning curve for our junior programmers since it's a bigger departure from what they're used to, but it's worth the climb. And while I think Acegi probably has a place in a packaged application where you're not sure what form the authentication database will take, it was waaayyy overkill and waaayyy, waaayyy to complex for what we needed. To this day I'm still the only one that can do maintainence on that part of the site. So then the powers-that-be sent down a decree that, since they consider us an IBM shop and HAL has said that JSF is the way of the future, that we would have to use JSF (even after all the discovery that had been done in-house). So we embarked on a two month fiasco to try and convert our current Struts 1 like, MVC applications, that have requirements like sending out formatted e-mails and generating PDF's on the fly, to JSF which was a dismal failure. Fast forward to 4 months ago when we started the actual rewrite of the first audience web site using Struts 2, Spring, and Tiles 2. We removed Acegi from the mix and wrote a very flexible (if I do say so myself) authentication/authorization system that is currently backed by both LDAP and ActiveDirectory (something we could never get working in Acegi). We have about 1 month left and we'll be "shipping" the first of the new, unified, web sites. Then it's on to the next audience. (*Chris*) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
