A long time ago I promised I'd get a "guideline" document for OpenSymphony. Well that item is still on my task list and it doesn't appear to be getting done. But I think I'm going to actually focus on getting this done. Joe Ottinger is also going to be helping me out, so hopefully in the not-too-distant future a concrete guideline covering everything from a high mission statement to low level details like logging and third party libraries will be covered.

5:51:25 PM    comment []

Today I spent some time on seeing if Ognl would be a good choice for bean manipulation in XWork. Well, things were running well until I hit two very large snags

1) Performance is the pits. I mean, Ognl is literally 25X slower than WebWork's BeanUtil method.

2) Ognl, like BeanUtil, OSCore BeanUtils, and Jakarta Commons-BeanUtils, has no way to get data in a type-specific way. This is actually more important than people tend to think. Sure, converting from input is important (setValue in all the above implementations has a way to convert data), but getting the data back in the same way we set it is equally important. Example:

User inputs a date as "02/12/1982". This should be calling FooAction.setBar(Date). FooAction also has a method "Date getBar()". But when we display the data back to the user, we want to display it as "02/12/1982" or "12/02/1982" or however the user first entered it. This means that type conversion needs to happen both ways, not just for setting values. So I think I'll write my own code that does this and is tuned specifically for XWork (Ognl has too much other stuff going on, which is probably why it's so much slower).

5:27:54 PM    comment []