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20050215 Tuesday February 15, 2005

Is Shale ready for primetime? Is Shale ready for prime-time and use in production applications? David Geary seems to think so:

My consulting job is pretty exciting. I'm using Shale heavily now, especially for wizards. Our application has both static wizards, for creating a new account, for example, and dynamic wizards that are generated from a description of an online-document.

Not only that, but he's going to be talking about it on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour this year.

To start the year, I'm doing three new presentations: "Shale: the next Struts", "Felix: a bag of tricks for JSF", and "Design Patterns: Tales from the server-side". Later on, I'll add two more presentations: in the near term, Killer Web UIs with Tiles and SiteMesh and a little later, a session on Laszlo.

I'm a huge believer in Shale. I have no doubt it's destined for great things, so I'm super-excited about the Shale session.

Now that I've talked about this, I'll probably be accused of caring more about Struts than the other web frameworks I use. In reality, I prefer most of the other frameworks in AppFuse and Equinox to Struts. However, at my current gig we're afraid to move from Struts because we're the only development group that hasn't fallen victim to the Big Blue umbrella. They've tried to make us use WebSphere, but we fought that off and continue to use JBoss. The fear is that if we don't use Struts, and use some lesser-known framework, they'll use that against us. That's why I like Shale - because it might be a way for me to use a more WebWork/JSF-type framework. Posted in Java at Feb 15 2005, 07:52:33 AM MST 8 Comments

Comments:

"Shale: the next Struts"? Where did you get that? The majority of sturts-dev are not interested in Shale, AFAIK. Shale is not the next Struts. Shale is Shale. Shales is one of sub projects of Struts, like BSF. It's possible Shale will die off. Next Struts is based on CoR, and avaiable for download in nighly builds! http://www.infonoia.com/en/content.jsp?d=inf.02.03 .V

Posted by Vic on February 15, 2005 at 09:47 AM MST #

My primary complaint about Struts is ActionForms. While they can be useful sometimes, I think it says something when all the other frameworks allow you to use your domain objects in your view. I looked at Struts 1.3 - ActionForms are still there. And I'm not interested in Maps or Collections to represent my domain model - sorry Vic. ;-)

Posted by Matt Raible on February 15, 2005 at 09:56 AM MST #

Matt, are you subscribed to struts-dev? We just had this very active discussion on the future of Struts Actions and ActionForms. In particular, I was arguing for getting rid of both Actions (as a super class) and ActionForms, to go with a POJO approach similar to Tapestry/JSF. An "action" class is a regular Java class with setters for properties (combining ActionForms with Action ala WW2), yet can have any number of "execute" type methods (ala JSF or dispatch action), and furthermore, instances would be scoped (could be either request, application, session, or dialog). If you wanted to argue against ActionForms, it would have been good to hear your detailed argument. Don

Posted by Don Brown on February 15, 2005 at 11:05 AM MST #

Hey Matt, I can't resist telling you about this: ;-)

For web applications with non-trivial page flow requirements (those demanding wizards, flows reused in other contexts, dynamic flows, flows audited/annotated), there is a new, strong solution I am very excited about:

Spring web flow!

Yep, "official" Spring support for Erwin Vervaet's awesome page flow model is coming in Spring 1.2, building on Spring MVC (WITH STRUTS 1.X INTEGRATION, TOO!). Erwin, Colin, and I have been readying a implementation we really think will be the next big thing: and yes Vic, you get your CoR with this baby. As soon as 1.1.5 is out the door (scheduled Feb 28th), it's moving to the main src tree!

Can you tell I'm excited?!?! :-) Matt, you will enjoy writing on this at the very least! :-) I sincerely hope you can leverage it in your new job, too!

Keith

Posted by Keith Donald on February 15, 2005 at 11:24 AM MST #

Matt, you may not like this link either.... not yet, mabye later. ;-)

Posted by Vic on February 16, 2005 at 08:57 AM MST #

My general feelings about ActionForm are they are the devil, or direct descendant there of. I posted here a while back. I still thing Spring's Binding/Error framework is the best, but its' web layer support for forms is still too enemic as compared to Webwork. I haven't decided if JSF, Shale, etc is worth the effort, but I will personally stay far far away from ActionForms if they are still in Struts future.

Posted by Patrick Peak on March 05, 2005 at 08:07 PM MST #

HI, The main article here says the writer has been using Shale on his current project. Where did you get it to download? I want to try it out and see for myself. Regards, Barry

Posted by Barry Hudson on April 04, 2005 at 12:30 PM MDT #

Barry - you can download nightly builds from http://wiki.apache.org/struts/StrutsShale.

Posted by Matt Raible on April 04, 2005 at 01:02 PM MDT #

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