The Framework
The core of the project/software offering is the Expresso Web
application framework. This framework (currently at version
5.05, but a release candidate for 5.31 is also available for
download) handles a number of crucial tasks for Web development:
- Object caching
- E-mail integration
- Database connection pooling
- Security, registration and login
- Controller objects
- XML support
- A number of other critical internal and external features
These features can speed the development process, and most Web
applications require many of them. One concern I had was that a
number of other, more well-known open-source projects currently
handle a lot of this: Struts, Velocity, Turbine, etc. Why would
someone want to go with a proprietary solution when there are a
number of "standards" that already exist?
Jcorporate obviously had similar concerns, as developers can now
use the Apache Struts paradigm from within Expresso--
allowing for tile integration and the overall MVC (Model-View-
Controller) paradigm struts offers--with the addition of the
features included in Expresso. This seemed to be a good solution
--especially if there was a compelling reason to utilize the
other services in Expresso, and provided they were intuitive to
use.
The documentation was well-written. A PDF developer's
guide provided a lot of good information for getting started,
and the documents page contains multiple resources from
presentations and component guides to database set-up guides and
more. This was refreshing to see in an open-source project.
Especially with Struts integration (and Struts familiarity), the
framework is fairly easy to implement. You create a package for
the new project, then create a number of different objects (such
as the schema, database objects and controller objects), then
utilize their configuration files and API to customize and
develop what you need to develop.
The Expresso framework is free. Developers are free to download
it and check it out. It is easy to install (it should on most
J2EE servers, though I had difficulty on JRun 4 and eventually
abandoned the quest)and the full version comes with Tomcat,
should you not have a J2EE server or JSP/Servlet engine.
Additionally, there are a number of components or plug-ins that
are free and others that aren't. Let's take a look at those.
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