[Webware-devel] forward() semantics changed since 0.8

[Geoffrey T. <gta...@na...>]

Ian and others,

Application.forward() has changed in semantics since the 0.8 release.

In 0.8, Application.forward() creates a _new_ Transaction object with a
corresponding new Response object.  This means that any output before and
after the call to Application.forward() is discarded.  This lets you, in the
middle of processing a request, and after you may have already called
self.write(), decide "oops, this isn't right, I need to hand off the request
to a completely different servlet and ignore any output so far".  You may
argue that this is poor coding practice -- I don't really have any argument
with that, but I already have code that relies on this behavior.

With CVS Head, Application.forward() forwards the existing Transaction and
Response to another servlet, causing its output to be included in the output
of the original servlet.  This seems to be exactly the behavior of
Application.includeURL() from Webware 0.8 and presumably also in Webware
CVS!

So my questions are (probably for Ian because I think he rewrote this):

- Did you intentionally change the behavior of Application.forward() or was
it an oversight?
- Can we restore the old semantics of Application.forward(), perhaps making
the current Webware CVS version of Application.forward() into
Application.includeURL() since that appears to be what it does?

My application cannot be run using Webware CVS because of this change in
behavior.


- Geoff