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List:       struts-user
Subject:    RE: Any Struts User uses the Expresso Framework ?
From:       "Michael Nash" <mnash () jcorporate ! com>
Date:       2001-08-31 22:02:58
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Kent:

> I think it really depends on your requirements and the skill level of your
> developers.  I personally would be careful about trying to learn
> and combine
> two frameworks, even if they serve two different purposes.

Actually, the combining is already done - we have Struts 1.0 fully
integrated with Expresso, thanks to Strut's clean design it was a pretty
painless process.

> Even though
> frameworks can be helpful, many times they can frustrate the development
> process.  Even though I am a supporter of Struts, there is a
> learning curve,
> and it can be big depending on what you are trying to do.  Most of my
> learning curve with Struts was trying to learn it the right way.

Absolutely. The biggest issue we've had with people using Expresso (even
before integration) was that it's "large" - it does a lot, and takes a while
to come to grips with - it integrates something like 7 other OSS projects,
after all :-) We're trying to answer that with better doc, better examples,
etc, but it'd difficult, no question about it. I guess the bottom line is
whether after the learning curve the productivity increase makes it worth
it. From my POV, that's very much the case.

>  I to
> agreee with the statement struts is somewhat independent of J2EE.
>  The great
> thing about Struts is that it is very flexible, and of course it is open
> source.
>
> One word of advice on your data layer, I would highly recommend
> staying away
> from entity beans (Most developers that I have talked to do not use them,
> and for a very good reason).  I recommend using JDBC in your session beans
> for updating, and data access beans for read only access.

Interesting... I had indeed heard that before, and it actually works to our
advantage in one way: if I can deploy our Controller objects (the business
logic) as Session beans, they already use the DBObject layer in Expresso to
do their database access (which is, by default JDBC-based). So it's one less
object to convert... and probably runs faster. That's good news, thanks!
We've already got distributed caching on the way for the DBObject layer, so
that issue is covered...

>  That is if
> performance is important to you.  If you take this approach, you will be
> free to do whatever you want.
>
> For whatever its worth,

I appreciate the feedback, thanks!

Regards,

Mike
Jcorporate Ltd.
http://www.jcorporate.com

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