Reviews : Adding Spice to Struts :

The Possible Solutions…

Most of us are used to working in a strict time schedule where often it becomes a compromise between the best solution and the cheapest solution. More often, we end up doing the cheapest solution to keep people above us happy as the project gets delivered on time. So here we outlined the possible solutions we had:

1. The cheapest solution would be to discard the DynaActionForm and use the normal ActionForm classes and create specific ActionForm classes to represent each domain object. In this approach, we could possibly create an ActionForm class for each of the classes in the domain model and even could cope with the inheritance very easily. In this solution, we could design a class structure as shown in Figure-2.

Figure 2: The ActionForm based solution

1. The solution we would however like to achieve (dare we say the best!) is to modify the struts internals to cope with the inheritance in a declarative way via the configuration file. To a solution architect, this one is alluring.

We have carefully weighed both the solutions that we have at hand and reached the following conclusions.

1. The solution 1 is by no means the ideal solution as we lose all the benefits of the DynaActionForm. The properties become pretty much hard coded within the ActionForm classes and the solution is less flexible.
2. Adding new properties to the forms means changing and recompiling the Java code whereas by using DynaActionForm we can add or remove properties in the configuration files.
3. More importantly, if we want to achieve dynamism in Model-View- Controller architecture where any change in the Model layer(Domain/Value objects) should only correspond a change in the View layer (JSPs), then it is pretty crucial that we refrain from such system where the Action classes and Form beans need to be changed to accommodate such features.

With these following conclusions in mind, we set out on the road to Solution 2.

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