Saturday February 21, 2004

It increases the maintenance burden by requiring mappings in two different xml files and these mappings are easily abused

For instance, suppose updating the UI logic on the SomerSault widget is required. The developer may have to traverse two different mapping types (struts class mapping and tiles component mapping)

1. look in struts-config.xml for the class mapped to /SomerSault.do
2. the <Action /> stanza forwards to something called somerSault.layout
3. ok, next, look in tiles-defs.xml and one might find that somerSault.layout maps to /SomerSaultContainer.do
4. alright, go back to the struts-config.xml to find /SomerSaultContainer.do and see that it maps to the type com.example.SomerSaultContainer

That's too many steps

There's no compile-time validation

The developer might make all of these changes and be please that everything compiles, including the JSP components (using the jasperC ant task). However, at runtime if the names don't match up, it's difficult to debug where the problem is.