rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Wednesday, 10 July 2002

Actions part of Controller or Model?. In the alternative framework WebWork, the action classes are part of the model and they include no presentation specific code (i.e. no Servlet API calls). Some would argue that this is better, but I think it is just different.  Nope - that's not the WebWork idea at all. WebWork isn't tied to the Servlet API - that is correct. But your action shouldn't be your model, that's incorrect. An action is a controller BUT (and it's a big but) WebWork can tie your existing model into the action nicely. Your model should be totally separate (as with Roller). Actions are just commands - they are used for data validation and to call the model. Example: If if you have a ModelBean (pure model) then your action has a ModelBean getModel() method - you can traverse your model using the expression language (<ww:property value="model/foo" />). Similarly if you have a form field or parameter named model/foo then WW will automatically call getModel().setFoo(value) before your action executes. Neat eh?  [Blogging Roller] 11:59:47 PM  comment []      Oops: I hope Mike wasn't reading what I wrote yesterday when he thought of this. :) Nope - just musing about the current economic climate. Everytime I talk to new people about Atlassian they invariably lower their voice and say "Do you think that's wise? I mean, at the moment?". Amuses me. 11:52:29 PM  comment []      My quote for today: Only a fool start a company in today's environment. Only a genius succeeds. 5:21:24 PM  comment []      Taken from Windley's weblog are these excellent set of principals for putting together a service that is web friendly. I think this should be a must read for most people building back end systems. [james strachan's musings] 12:40:04 PM  comment []      Wow - and to think that last month I blogged a post bemoaning the lack of Open Source J2EE workflow projects. I now know of about 5! It would be really cool if they could collaborate on some basics (or at least import / export each other's XML workflow specifications) We should hopefully be able to merge ideas from commons-workflow and Jelly along with blissed, drools and werkflow to make a flexible workflow core that can be used on Struts for wizard dialogs or with Messenger to build JMS based workflow or on Tambora to make XML based document workflow systems. [james strachan's musings] 12:36:33 PM  comment []      workflow-discuss is a new list for discussing workflow related issues. Patrick (OSWorkflow guru) should subscribe to this. [james strachan's musings] 12:33:03 PM  comment []      Blog Chalking is a cool idea! This post is my blog chalk post! Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, Australia, Sydney, Glebe, Mike, Male, 21-25! 12:20:41 PM  comment []      I hate being correct about stuff like this. It seems that Oracle has tossed most of the WebGain prodcuts on the scrpa heap. From an article on CNET. Apparently Oracle bought only TopLink and left the rest of the WebGain products to rot in the hot sun while the (Oracle, Sun, etc.) buzzards circle overhead. [Blogging Roller] 12:17:05 PM  comment []      Matt Mower is looking for a job (or consulting work). He says a lot of smart things in his blog so I thought I'd pass on his details. Skills? "blogging, k-logging, knowledge management, intranets, collaboration and communities" 12:03:02 PM  comment []      Mac Net Journal links to an interesting article on the increasing practice of server side email filtering. Very scary. Just mention something like Viagra and it seems that hundreds of companies will block your email (and the user never knows about it). I'm sure this will be a growing phenomenon. In short, we're starting to see signs that email, often hailed as the Internet's "killer app," is in danger of becoming an unreliable, arbitrarily censored medium - and there's very little we can do about it. 12:00:29 PM  comment []      The ServerSide notes that the new JSP Standard Tag Libraries spec (1.0) is finally available, and also that Sun has released the new Pet Store 1.3.1 which includes web services integration. I always wish that the Pet Store was a better blue print. Blue prints shouldn't suck . 11:55:22 AM  comment []      Brett on Baking vs Frying (or static vs dynamic sites). This is a concept that has been around for a while. I think the first site to mention it (that I've seen) is Ian Kallen's great presentation on Salon's content management architecture. If you haven't read it I recommend that you do. I always try to bake as much as possible, but to build great sites and great web-based applications you just can't not fry. JIRA does a lot of frying, but it wouldn't be possible to build without it. One of the philosophies behind OSCache is to allow you to 'dynamically bake' sections of content on the fly, to reduce the overhead of frying. 11:51:29 AM  comment []