Re: [Gusdev-gusdev] Struts documentation - supporting evidence

[Adrian R. T. <ar...@sa...>]

> Adrian-
> 
> i am only going to address one point now, pending more time to review 
> and learn.  that said, on the whole, this looks very good.
> 
> i would like to address, point (1), the build system and the directory 
> structure.  your answer below says "the dir struct is self contained, 
> and we're using ant, so no prob."   i am not quite sure if you mean (a) 
> that therefore we can use the dir struct you have with the build sys, or 
> (b) it would be easy to rearrange it to conform.  if case (a), i'm not 
> sure i see compatibility here: the dir struct has many of the same 
> elements of those that we use in GUS, but, they are arranged 
> differently.   i should mention that i do think it would be very easy to 
> stuff this kind of thing into our dir struct, but, since i don't have a 
> thorough comprehension yet, perhaps not.

I think (b). We deliberately tried to limit the number of dependancies in the
demo so didn't try and integrate it into the GUS build mechanism, which I
haven't got in front of me. I would guess the src and lib directories (any
others?) should be merged into the existing dir. structure. The rest is really
website specific so should probably go into a new (file-system) branch, wdk or
something. Does this sound reasonable?  


> a subpoint of that point:  you say below that you envision overlaying 
> files to acheive customization.  I think i want to hear more about 
> that.  my concern is that overlaying violates good subclassing 
> practice.  in particular, if i overlay code, then i have to duplicate 
> the "base" code in my customized version that i still want.

Although the docs. didn't make it clear we're not really thinking about
overlaying the code. As you say there are already mechanisms for reusing it
while still extending and/or modifying its behaviour (either by inheritance or
delegation). But there are no similar mechanisms for images, layouts, JSP pages,
query config files etc. So it's those that people can override by overlay. (One
slight extension - if we have an XInclude processor we can potentially split the
various XML config files into sections so that other sites can include shared
sections they want without cut'n'pasting.)

> 
> steve

A