Re: [Bodington-developers] spring

[Matthew B. <mat...@ou...>]

John Norman wrote:
> Would you welcome some of my developers to share what we have learned  
> from our Sakai work? I can get Ian and Antranig to join the list and  
> maybe someone from Indiana if you want to thrash out where these  
> technologies work well and where they don't...

Yeah I'd be interested to hear about others experience.

Background:

At the moment Bodington hands control straight to the template(view) 
which then calls the business logic and renders the response. Templates 
are like restricted JSPs.

I wanted to move to an MVC architecture for the servlet layer as it is 
one of the weaker areas of Bodington at the moment. Due to bodingtons 
use of good URLs and very page orientated layout some frameworks didn't 
get much consideration:

	Tapestry - Bad URLs (better now), component architecture.
	JSF - Bad URLs, component architecture.

An obvious candidate was struts as it is very popular (if aging) and as 
a result most experienced Java developers will know a little about it. I 
also had used it on a previous project. Although I got it working a 
little I couldn't manage to get it to work well with Bodingtons tree 
style URLs without starting to hack at struts itself.

Next I looked at SpringMVC which is harder to get started with but much 
more flexible. SpringMVC has a reasonable community, acceptable 
documentation and books. SpringMVC works ok alongside Bodington so that 
is what I have stuck with so far.

For the presentation I used JSPs (no scriptlets) with Core, Spring and 
Template taglibs. SpringMVC can work with XSLT, Velocity, Freemarker 
istead of JSPs for view.


-- 
  -- Matthew Buckett, VLE Developer
  -- Learning Technologies Group, Oxford University Computing Services
  -- Tel: +44 (0)1865 283660 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/