Whither ActionMappings
Ted Husted made a post last Friday to the struts-user mailing list. It looks like a good post for rookie struts users. I haven't read it, but hopefully by bookmarking it here, I'll read it soon.
Haven't quite decided where to use this, and it didn't seem like the best time to squeeze something new into the docs =:0), so I thought I'd post it here for now, in case it were of interest to some.
WHITHER ACTION MAPPINGS?
We write applications to do things for people. We might say, for example, that we want the appication to create a mail-merge job for us. Some developers call these top-level tasks "client stories". In practice, to do a big job like this, an application will need to take several smaller steps. We'll need to obtain the information from the user about which mail-merge job to create. We'll need to find the items to merge. We'll need to put the items together with a template, and we'll need to present the result back to the user. Some developers call these smaller tasks "use cases". To complete a client story, we usually chain several use cases together. A chain of use cases is sometimes called a workflow.
Before doing any thing for us, most applications wait to be asked. When we ask the application to do something, we usually need to provide a variety of details. If we ask the application to store a name and address, we need to provide the name and address to go along with the request. [read more...]