Topic Archive: Struts

MetaWidget - Convention over Configuration UI

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, July 17, 2008 @ 6:09 pm

I already know that I'm not going to do MetaWidget justice as I describe it. What the heck is it? According to the MetaWidget site, it is...

Metawidget takes your domain objects and automatically creates User Interface widgets for them, saving you handcoding your UIs and leaving you to concentrate on stitching together your application.

Think of a configurable form widget driven off of your beans through runtime inspection of properties, getters and setters, annotations, etc.

But wait, there's more. It automatically detects your backend at runtime and makes friends with Hibernate, Spring, Seam, Groovy, etc.
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agile ajax

Struts and the Tension Headache

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, May 17, 2006 @ 9:00 am

I'm spoiled. This past week I had to go back and revisit a Struts application I developed back in the early days, before Hibernate, before EJB's. I found myself developing an anger headache as I bounced between the struts-config.xml, the web.xml, the jsp's, the home-brew ORM layer, and the various validators, actions and pieces of business logic. Even using an IDE and with well documented code, it was a real pain to make just a handful of modifications. Each time I made a change, it seemed that I had to modify three or four files to make it work. A little XML, a little JSP, a little Java, a little SQL. Oiy!

Why did this stuff make me so angry? Hadn't I designed my code in layers to avoid all this mess? Well, it was actually pretty painless for a struts application. The problem is that struts, and most frameworks, expose too much of the plumbing and force developers to repeat themselves in several places and in different languages and formats.

Why didn't I just accept that this was the way things were? Because I'd spent the last 7 days working on an AJAX newspaper interface using Echo2, and I hadn't spent one second writing HTML, Javascript, XML plumbing or SQL. Just Java. And now here I was back in the bad old world of the web worrying about sessions and postbacks, repeating myself over and over again in different languages.

Yes, things today aren't as bad as in the early days of struts. Hibernate and Spring have made things easy on the ORM front, so I write little or no SQL. Web application frameworks like Webwork and JSF are moving toward components and a higher level of abstraction. But the problem I have with their MVC is that all three really should be realized in Java, not a mix of different languages. That's the only way to stay DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself).

So, why isn't everyone embracing this new, pure Java (or C#, or Ruby, pick your poison) way of writing apps?

Paradigm Shift
People tend to overuse the term "Paradigm Shift", which was coined by Thomas Kuhn back in 1962 in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. What does it mean, Paradigm Shift? It happens when a scientific theory can no longer explain the facts, i.e. when enough anomalies have cropped up to invalidate it. When this occurs, it isn't just the theory that is discarded but the whole worldview from which is comes. From the Wikipedia:

When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. During this crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are tried. Eventually a new
paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers, and an
intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new
paradigm and the hold-outs of the old paradigm.

Yes, we're not fighting about Ptolemaic versus Copernican cosmology and if the latter meant that man was no longer the center of all creation. In our case the paradigm is not how which questions we ask and what experiments we do, but rather how we build web applications now that AJAX has come along. The worldview is not whether the planets revolve around the Earth or the Sun, but what exactly web applications can do. The battle is between those who want to build web applications with the old methods -- sort of a souped-up struts with AJAX -- or with the component GUI approach.

I for one am on the side of the component GUI's. I can't stand the tension headaches.

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