RE: [Webware-discuss] content generation

[Love, J. <Jay...@us...>]

I think this code is a step in the right direction.  In needs a lot of
cleanup, but it seems to add a nice level of abstraction to the mapping
process.

As far as implementing this as a pluggable architecture, I have a design
that I have been meaning to implement where this would fit very well.

The basic idea is to create a Context object.  The Context object would be
added as a member of Transaction when a request is processed.  The default
Context object would simply provide some threadsafe methods for varibale
storage and retrieval.  We could add a URLDecoder as a default member of the
default Context object.

To add this decoding object to the mix, we might try this:

A context registers itself with the application in the normal way.  In the
context's package intialization code, we give it the chance to register a
custom Context object that it would like to be used.  That custom Context
object can do anything the developer wants, including using a custom url
decoder.  If the context does not register a custom Context object, the
stock Context object and URLDecoder implementation is used.

When a request comes in, Application determines which context the request
should go to, just as it does now.  However, Application's processing stops
there, it does not determine the url mapping itself.  Instead, once it
determines the context, it calls that context's Context instance to decode
the URL and return a server side path.  Then, processing continues normally.

The main drawback I see is that this only allows for one level of mapping,
ie the context determination only happens at the top level directory.  But I
don't think that's a particularly large problem.

The attractiveness of the Context object is that it could also do some basic
processing before a Servlet is actually called. So it could do an
authentication check, etc, so that code wouldn't need to be placed in every
Servlet.

Any comments?

Jay




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