Re: [Springframework-developer] View technologies

[Rod J. <rod...@in...>]

JP,

Good point.

- XML/XSLT: this one was not really a requested feature. The cyclic java
architecture, even in core objects, was really a problem (example: a
Locale has a defaultLocale property which is itself a Locale.). This
problem was noticed by Rod, but worked not as good as expected, the
source of the patched jar being not available and the original library
didn't be aware of this problem. My feel is that in real world a product
like Castor will certainly be better, even if it's more complex at the
beginning.

I agree. I think Castor is a better approach. However, I think having
support for transforms in Spring would be good: might have to put the onus
on the user to provide the doument.

- XMLC: I had no reason for testing it and don't like too much the
approach.

XMLC is amazingly fast and, while a bit weird, it has some things going for
it. Unfortunately the XmlcView brings in about 2 Mb of XMLC dependencies, so
it would be a real problem with third party libs. Although I guess that
affects only developers.


-PDF-iText: I had to render queries results in PDF format for friendly
printing and emailing the results as one clean document. I had no time
to search on others ways like FOP having in a sense a more attractive
approach. But iText was simple to learn and the result is good. The only
drawback is the servlet-style writing hand-coded presentation.

RJ - This depends on only one Jar. Maybe we should put it back in Spring.

-Excel-POI: It was not in Rod's book, but always the same data had to be
reworked by users, so an Excel document was a good choice. Having the
velocity and iText views source, it was simple to write an ExcelView
class using Jakarta's POI.  This class loads an Excel template (it can
also generate a blank document), completes it before serving. Also a
nice result. The same drawback as for iText can be addressed.

RJ - Could be useful to have this in Spring.

I think we should put XML on the todo list, put PDF (iText) back in, and add
JP's Excel view.

If there's agreement on this I'll add the PDF view shortly.

Regards,
Rod