Archive for December, 2006

Integrating Prototype Ajax engine with Struts Application

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

You can achieve Ajax effect in any struts application (Struts1.x ) with prototype in a very simple way.

In normal Struts application we generally use DispatchAction to make our web app and life easy. In general struts controller gets a request and delegates it to corresponding action/dispatchAction subclasses. Depending on the method name parameter our target method gets invoked and after processing of some business/domain objects finally forwards a mapping(configured in struts-config.xml) towards the view tier and a JSP gets rendered in our thin client as a response.

Now when we think of Ajax in this kind of application model, we can consider two types of implementation of Ajax: Partial Page Rendering and Partial Response update.

Problem: A form based application has too many fields to be filled in by the user but majority of the fields or group of fields are optional and it takes time to render those fields and thus the entire page. (more…)

Java way of doing Ruby on Rails

Monday, December 11th, 2006

New kid on the J2EE blocks, RomaFramework, no not another new framework for confusing you by adding your framework bookmarks.

Inspired by Ruby on Rails a new java based framework for Ajaxified Web based application development framework that’s can turn your heads with some cool features:

  • Roma it’’s totally based on POJO (Plain Old Java Objects)
  • True Object Oriented vision in all aspects: from the model to the view and to the repository/database
  • Encourage the use of the Domain Driven Model (DDD) approach: let’’s think to the Domain: the other things are secondary Aspects
  • It works with Conventions ala Ruby On Rails: much less code to write and maintain and more uniformity in projects
  • Applications are fully portable across frameworks since the application is developed using POJOs. For example you can switch between JDO and EJB3 PersistenceAspect without changing code unless you use directly the aspect implementation (see below)
  • Allow to makes things dirty: you can use directly the target framework taking the full advantage of the implementation power
  • You can use the already developed Modules (CRUD, User&Profiles, etc.) and extend their if you need
  • The skill requested to build application can be lower than required for modern Java Web Applications: minor cost of development
  • Roma is based on Spring Framework as IoC container, but you can use another one if you want.
  • The supported frameworks and tools are continuously update on Modules page.

You can have the pleasure of Ajax web front-end with the help of Echo framework and if you are too much conservative and do not want to break out your tie with JSP you can do that too with this framework.

It’s worth checking this framework before going for any other RAD framework in J2EE space.