RE: [Webmacro-devel] WM WebApp design draft

[<kea...@na...>]

I've been out of town so I haven't had a chance to really follow this
thread, but I definitely like the general idea.

On the issue of helpers vs. ContextTools, I've been playing around with
generic ContextTool loaders which I think can go a long way to addressing
the issue.  For example, I've created a FactoryToolLoader class which lets
you configure any factory method to put objects into the context.  This is
basically a "Flyweight" factory class for loading singletons into the
context.  You configure it as follows:

================================================================
# Load a class using SampleFatoryTool.getInstance() into the context as
$Sample
ContextTools.Sample: org.webmacro.datatable.FactoryToolLoader
Sample.ClassName: org.webmacro.datatable.SampleFactoryTool

# Load a class using ListUtil.getInstance() into the context as $Lister
ContextTools.Lister: org.webmacro.datatable.FactoryToolLoader
Lister.ClassName: org.webmacro.servlet.ListUtil
================================================================

By default it uses "getInstance" as the method name, although you can
specify a MethodName parameter if you want.

We could do something similar for "scoped" classes (global/static, per app,
per session, per request).  Per request classes with an method matching
"void setContext(Context)" could get access to the current context.  Session
and app classes could use setSession and setBroker or some such.  I haven't
worked out the destroy() semantics yet, but that should be straightforward.

The beauty of this is that it requires no changes to any classes, just a
couple new context tools, and then virtually any class can be used as a tool
with minimal configuration and no WM specific code.

Of course we could simplify things even further by having new configuration
options, e.g.,

StaticContextTool.Thingy: o.w.u.SomeStaticThingy
GlobalContextTool.Dodad: o.w.u.SomeGlobalDodad
AppContextTool.Whatzama: o.w.u.SomeAppWhatzamajigger
SessionContextTool.Dohick: o.w.u.SomeSessionDohicky
RequestContextTool.Mabob: o.w.u.SomeRequestThingamabob

Thoughts?

Keats