Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to A Technical Paper on Java

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Posted by C. R. Oldham on

Dan Wickstrom writes:

It's deceptively similar to acs-tcl-4, but once your start debugging, you will realize that you're in a whole different world, and it's not a friendly place.

Good point, Dan. Having never dabbled in ACS-Java I was unaware of this. Thank you for the detailed example.

And what is special about MVC with regards to servlets? That paradigm can be implemented in tcl as well.

Sure, it could, but there is no support for that in OpenACS right now and we're back to the underlying technology vs. toolkit issues--all the servlet-based toolkits I looked at were structured around MVC. To embellish Ben's article, I was just looking for reasons why someone would pick a servlet framework over OpenACS and that's one. It was very compelling to me because right now in OpenACS flow control is tied to page views. Or am I mistaken?

To me, MVC seems the logical way to structure a web application that might at some point need to deliver different views of data to different devices. Granted, XSLT support is now in AOLserver, so maybe that solves the problem a better way.