Struts, view-framework pluggability, XSLT, and Maverick

[Rob Jellinghaus <ro...@unrealities.com>]

One of the difficult things in open source development is getting a sense 
of where a project is headed... todo information tends to only slightly 
capture what a given group of hackers is really focused on, and it's hard 
to glean total insight from the mailing lists.

So:  I am spinning up on open-source Java web app frameworks.  The main 
contenders seem to be Cocoon, Struts, and Maverick.

Cocoon (http://xml.apache.org/cocoon) looked really good (especially its 
focus on efficient SAX processing), but it seems that Cocoon started from a 
document processing orientation (publishing content in lots of different 
ways) rather than from an interactive application orientation (supporting 
control flow throughout an interactive web app).  Cocoon has support for 
interaction but it is hard to see how to use it, especially once I started 
looking at Struts where it couldn't be clearer.  So I have (with some 
regret) backed off of Cocoon.

Struts (http://jakarta.apache.org/struts, of course) has a very 
straightforward concept of action mapping and website interaction, which I 
like a lot.  Its documentation is also in very good shape, and its 
developer community seems to be thriving.  However, Struts is currently 
fairly wedded to JSP, at least in its 1.0.2 and 1.1-beta distributions; 
there seems to be no integrated support for using non-JSP 
presentations.  Especially when compared to:

Maverick (http://mav.sourceforge.net) has (on cursory examination) a clean 
ability to plug in different presentation frameworks.  (JSP, XSLT, or 
Velocity at the moment.)  It also seems to share Struts' ease of 
interaction configurability.  However, it also is a lot younger than 
Struts, and it lacks the mass of Struts examples and documentation.

In an email thread discussing the Model 2X Javaworld article 
(http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-02-2002/jw-0201-strutsxslt.html), 
Ted Husted and Jeff Schnitzer seemed to agree that Struts and Maverick had 
a lot in common, and that it might make sense to merge the projects, or at 
least to continue moving Struts in the direction of making it easier to 
plug in alternate presentation frameworks:

   http://www.mail-archive.com/struts-user@jakarta.apache.org/msg22749.html
   http://www.mail-archive.com/struts-user@jakarta.apache.org/msg22760.html

My questions are really for Struts developers (and Maverick developers):

Is there consensus that making Struts more presentation-pluggable, or in 
some other way more amenable to using other presentation frameworks, is the 
direction Struts should go?

If so, is there any plan for doing the work?  Is anyone doing active 
development in this area right now?  I have seen various references (the 
code linked from the above Model 2X article; Ted Husted's "Velocity 
servlet") that indicate that people have done some work in this area 
already, but it certainly hasn't made it into the Struts mainline.  Will 
it?  How?

I am very motivated to help make this happen... unfortunately I'm 
time-constrained.  But having a clearer picture of whether others are 
moving in this direction could help me (and others?) understand eactly 
where to pitch in to move this forwards.

Your thoughts?
Cheers,
Rob Jellinghaus
(committer on the Axis project, and perhaps someday on Struts?)





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