Re: [Springframework-developer] Component Centric Web Framework for Spring

[Rob H. <ro...@in...>]

Just to interject here - scripting has been present since M2 with  
BSH, JRuby and Groovy.

Rob
On 26 Mar 2006, at 18:36, Darren Davison wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 06:29:12AM -0500, Keith Donald wrote:
>> Hey Darren,
>>
>> Could you maybe summarize what you see in Django that would be good
>> influence for future enhancements to Spring's web stack?  Would be  
>> good to
>> consider and discuss those for the 2.x series and beyond...
>>
>> One of the features I see on a brief glance I think is important  
>> is the
>> ability to design your on URL scheme using URL mapping expressions.
>
> Hi Keith,
>
> In my opinion, the biggest barrier to leaner, more dynamic Java web
> frameworks is the Servlet API itself.  RoR, Django, CherryPy and  
> others
> aren't constrained by it and manage to do pretty well for  
> themselves.  What
> does the requirement for an implementation of this API buy for the  
> large
> number of enterprise web apps which are basically CRUD wrappers  
> around a
> database?  Many of the existing frameworks in Java land are  
> starting to look
> a bit too heavy for this compared to the ease of setting up in Ruby or
> Python.
>
> The ability to map URL's directly to objects or methods via  
> something as
> simple as regex declarations lowers the barriers to entry greatly  
> and makes
> a simple web layer very quick to knock up.  OOWeb for example (a  
> simple Java
> port of CherryPy that a colleague and I wrote last year just to  
> prove the
> point) offers a complete web novice the ability to start generating  
> dynamic
> web content in less than 10 minutes.  You get request parameter  
> binding to
> your methods, form handling, security, logging, session replication  
> and a
> simple built-in HTTP server in a jar that's around 60KB in size  
> with zero
> additional dependencies.  OK, so it's prototype stuff, but its  
> purpose was
> to show that if you don't constrain yourself to the "standard" way of
> thinking (Servlet API), you can do quite a lot of stuff with  
> greater ease
> and speed.  OOWeb is in fact being used in a couple of small  
> production
> sites anyway, but if we were to look at it seriously, we'd probably  
> take the
> HTTP engine from Jetty or something and build the object mapper  
> around that.
>
> The other aspect is the scriptability of the web tier.  I know the  
> dynamic
> stuff around BSF bean definitions hasn't really gone anywhere since  
> it was
> mooted a couple of years ago, but this may be the best way forward  
> if we
> want to hang on to the coat tails of things like Python and Ruby.   
> Jython
> development seems to have stalled, which is a shame, and Groovy  
> doesn't
> really appear to be building on the momentum it looked like having  
> a while
> back either, but perhaps being first class citizens in a major web  
> framework
> would help.
>
> Consider the Java web application framework "sans Servlet  
> Container", and
> Spring seems to be in a perfect position to exploit an  
> opportunity.  After
> all, we already have a fantastic container and all the goodies you  
> need to
> create a full featured service and data tier.  If you could throw  
> up a web
> tier around your database in the same sort of time that you can be
> productive in Django and RoR (including re-code and re-load  
> semantics) then
> that might be attractive to a lot of people who are currently  
> flirting with
> the more dynamic upstarts.  Having the Java bindings available from  
> web
> scripts to the Spring container or other "Enterprise" deployed  
> components is
> the USP that the others don't have.
>
> "Spring WebScript" - imagine the possibilities :)
>
> -- 
> Darren Davison
> Public Key: 0xDD356B0D