[Springframework-developer] MVC DispatcherSevlet vs HandlerServlet

[Alef A. <al...@jt...>]

Juergen, everybody,
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As you might have seen, we're pretty busy promoting XFire. Jason
(Carreira) and Hani are both using it and as it seems they are pretty
positive! One thing that concerns me a bit is the DispatcherServlet for
Spring. Our current exporters are Controllers while in fact the don't
really have to return a ModelAndView (they handle everything
themselves). Furthermore there is a lot of stuff going on in teh
DispatcherServlet that doesn't really concern remoting (locale handling,
view resolving, theme handling - of which I think the latter should be
deprecated in 1.3 and removed in 2.0 maybe since nobody uses it). I was
dicussing with Arjen (co-worker, XFire committer) the option to
introduce a extra level of abstraction for the DispatcherServlet.
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1) DispatcherServlet extends HandlerServlet extends FrameworkServlet or
2) DispatcherServlet extends FrameworkServlet and an additional
RemotingServlet extends FrameworkServlet
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The reasoning here would be the following:
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a) remove the need to create a xxx-servlet.xml if you only have
annotated services (for instance with JSR181 annotations)
b) remove themehandling, localehandling, etcetera when exporting
services through http, rmi, soap, etcetera
c) remove the need for people (like Jason) that don't like Spring Web
MVC to use the DispatcherServlet (I know, it's stupid, but Jason already
implemented his own custom servlet :)
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This might also facilitate the separation of the MVC bits and the core
if we want this (themehandling, localehandling are only needed in case
you're doing web mvc).
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What do you think?
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alef
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