Admin Console Web-tier technology

[ccrouch]

The JBoss AS Admin Console is planning to use Struts 1.2.x for its web-tier framework for the following reasons:

- It is a mature technology and is widely used in production environments.
- Since it is so widely adopted there is a greater likelihood of generating community interest and contributions.
- By using the same technologies across multiple JBoss Network projects, e.g. the Admin Console and the Push Portal, we hope to be able to reuse both developer knowledge and actual components.

Please let me know any comments.
Thanks

[starksm64]

This is really a short term solution so the association of community interest around this fact is also short term. Longer term we want this to be based on portals and leverage JSF.

[ccrouch]

This is really a short term solution so the association of community interest around this fact is also short term. Longer term we want this to be based on portals and leverage JSF.

Agreed. The choice of Struts was above all a pragmatic step based on the desire to ensure we meet the current project deadlines. In the future the web-tier of the Admin Console will very likely move to JBoss Portal v2 + JSF. In the meantime care will be taken to avoid tying the current implementation to any Struts specific features. This should ensure that the future transition to another web-tier technology will go smoothly.

[ccrouch]

A bit more meat on the bones of the web-tier design:

This will be a Struts-based web application using JSP's for rendering the view. Struts Actions and Forms will be packaged by component area, e.g. Datasource, JMS. The view layer will use css for layout and formatting, using tables where necessary. Tiles will be used to pull together the various page components, e.g. Headers, Menu, Footer, Main, into a single page.

Client side validation will be used for simple field validation. The bulk of the data entry validation will be done on the server side and will be encapsulated in classes which do not depend on the Struts framework.

For authentication and authorization a similar mechanism will be put in place as we have today for the web-console and jmx-console. By default security constraints will be commented out in the web.xml. If security is enabled the authentication method used will be BASIC. A new security domain will be added to conf/login-config.xml using UsersRolesLoginModule and default users.properties and roles.properties will be provided.

The application will obviously be packaged as a WAR file with all web-tier related classes appearing in web-inf/classes, rather than a separate jar.

Thanks