Weddings and Ramblings

Ok, I haven’t blogged lately (for the whole 3 months). But just the past few days, I was thinking about a couple of tech issues based on the trend of web frameworks and such.

Anyway, lets examine the traditional HTML/JSP model first. javabeans and JSTL are used for data and business logic, HTML is used for layout, and CSS is used for .. well … styles and appearances. So now, we have 3 independantly configurable elements that co-exist to bring together our presentation layer.

One of the pleasing things I like about CSS is its strength in creating layouts and changing the appearance of the presentation layer. I can change the look of the site totally by just tinkering with the style sheets. One very solid example of this would be to look at csszengarden

Of course, now with the introduction of web frameworks, I wonder about whether the flexibility of such a setup is being lost. Of course, I can’t speak of all the frameworks, but recently, I tried out Oracle’s ADF-Faces, and there’s this on thing that really bugged me. The use of the ADF-Faces components locked down the look and field. So when we use stuff like tabbed panes, thats what we have. IF i did it in style sheets, i could change it to look like tabbed panes, drop down menus etc using CSS. Of course, I do like the idea that each component is tied to a backing bean, but what it enforces is just the “beans for business logic” concept and thats a general JSF thing. ADF-Faces does expose a template for changing the components, but of course, I took a quick glimpse at it and it looked complicated (for a man of my limited talents).

The bottom line is this, while frameworks are the in thing now in the industry, is such a move necessary, or is it an overkill ? Some points to ponder… perhaps I’d update this topic more when I have time to take a more detailed look at it. I’m busy working on some raster stuff that I have a very very limited experience in.

Tagged: tech