9 Replies Latest reply on Apr 29, 2004 3:45 PM by niel

    existing sample sites & templating

    brain_in_vat

      Hi,
      Are there any sample sites for JBoss Nukes, other than jboss.org? I'd like an indication of what others are doing with JBoss, visually.

      My main point of hesitation in investing more time into Nukes is the JSP and templating issue. One user has posted an example of using velocity with Nukes, I know, so that's sort of promising.

      What sort of priority have you guys placed on moving towards JSPs for presentation? Is the .tpl template language a PHP port also? It's not very relevant to the skillset of most Java developers.

      Cheers,
      Nick

        • 1. Re: existing sample sites & templating



          Was the wiki page about JSPs http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3830670#3830670 not enough? It does represent the current state of play with JSPs.

          Personally, using JSPs for the view is a hot button for me. Nukes 2.0 with portlets (JSR 168) will have all this. I am working on the tag library now.

          The .tpls are from PHPNukes. The initial aim of Nukes was to recreate the PHP functionality with JBoss.


          Sherman

          • 2. Re: existing sample sites & templating
            brain_in_vat

            Hi Sherman,
            Yes, I read the page you linked in the other post. If I write a Nukes module it will prove helpful; I don't want to use tpl.
            No, it didn't answer the strategy you guys have for opening up the presentation layer in Nukes.

            Nick

            • 3. Re: existing sample sites & templating

               

              No, it didn't answer the strategy you guys have for opening up the presentation layer in Nukes.


              What more can I say than "JSR 168"? JSPs will be the views.

              Sherman

              • 4. Re: existing sample sites & templating
                hxp

                Nick --

                You want a roadmap, but the culture here doesn't quite work that way. If you want to see a particular thing happen, the best way to ensure that it does is contribute so that the project moves in that direction. So far, the core contributors are guys who feel that working code is much more important than strategic plans. They have evolved Nukes through a number of refactorings and rewrites, with the idea of keeping it working from step to step, while incrementally improving functionality.

                So the Nukes team is not working off some grand vision, but off of what each person feels is most important to do next --- and, hey, you're looking at a result that at least works... which is a lot more than you can say about lots of projects with fancy roadmaps. IMHO, strategy and architecture and planning are also quite important, and I hope to see more of that perspective in Nukes in the future, but I have to tip my hat to the practical wisdom of "rough concensus and running code" !

                Julien is now making a major shift in the Nukes front end architecture, because the need for JSR-168 support rose to top priority. As he works through that process, he will naturally generalize some of the existing code to accomodate portlets, JSPs, etc as mandated by JSR-168.

                ( You know how you'll rework and "stretch" your interfaces into more general form when you go from having to support 1 concrete class to having to support 2 or 3 or 4....? So after having to support the TPLs and the JSPs and having to meet JSR-168 requirements, the front end code ought to look more general and flexible and accommodating than it does today. )

                So after Julien accomplishes JSR-168 compliance, I predict it will be much easier for the rest of us developers to generalize further, and create support for a wider range of front end approaches --- including the more java-oriented kinds of templating (such as Velocity) .... and especially the most powerful and widely adopted standard for templating (XSL).

                That said, Nukes is now maturing to a point where "Architectural contributions" may be (almost) as welcome as "Code contributions". So if you have specific ideas of what would be good, how about writing them up in some detail and putting them on a wiki page? (Adding some prototype code wouldnt hurt, either) ;-)


                You can make a home for your contributions in the wiki:

                http://jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=NukesForJBoss

                http://jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=RequestsForFeatureEnhancements


                My .02

                -- Howard

                • 5. Re: existing sample sites & templating
                  brain_in_vat

                  hxp,
                  Thanks for your response.
                  You made some good points - I guess the main issue is to secure what I want from Nukes by being active in achieving it, within the current code-base. I didn't want to invest time in Nukes if was going to keep TPL as its preferred templating system ...

                  We'll see. I might give it another go this weekend. So long as there's active dialogue among the developers it could be promising.

                  Regards,
                  Nick

                  • 6. Re: existing sample sites & templating
                    niel

                    You may want to take a peak at http://www.skywaybuilder.com to see what we're doing with Nukes. We are happy with the flexibility of the Nukes themes. We created our own theme to match the rest of our support site.

                    By the way, we are using nukes for the support section. The front-end is built using Skyway Builder.

                    • 7. Re: existing sample sites & templating

                      ouah, I am really impressed

                      • 8. Re: existing sample sites & templating

                        by the way you are using the news module :-), which nukes version is it ?

                        • 9. Re: existing sample sites & templating
                          niel

                          Thanks. We are using a version we pulled from CVS last week. I guess it's somewhere between 1.0 and 1.1.

                          Yes, we are using the news module. We are also showing the news items in the front page of our support site through a Skyway Builder "discovered external data source" feature. It worked out really well.