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MeshCMS 4: a Refactor Instead of a Rewrite

English
technical 2 min read

I'm back to MeshCMS 4 after the Oracle shock. I'm learning GWT and it is proving very efficient. The file manager rewriting is going on smoothly.

I've changed my approach: I'm refactoring rather that rewriting. Of course the user interface needs a rewrite, since obviously I can't refactor JSP pages to GWT classes, but dealing with Java classes only opens a lot of chances to refactor and improve code.

At the moment I'm counting on NetBeans only to refactor, but when I will be at a more advanced stage, I'll use some other tool to improve code quality, like PMD, FindBugs or Unnecessary Code Detector.

I've also read that SiteMesh 2.4.x has been released and that the IMHO major bug of useless session creation has been solved. I might think about bringing it back, but without throwing away the new "engine". I must abstract things a bit so they can be plugged.

I'm attempting to put every page related info into the page itself, i.e. no separated SiteInfo. This is how a sample page looks like:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>MeshCMS 4 Sample Page</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
    <meta name="keywords" content="one, two, three and four" />
    <meta name="description" content="This is a sample page showing some new characteristics in MeshCMS 4" />

    <!-- an example of inline style -->
    <style type="text/css">
      body {
        font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
      }
    </style>

    <!-- this script contains all information specific to MeshCMS, in JSON format -->
    <script type="application/javascript">
        // <![CDATA[
        var meshcmsPageInfo = {
            "shortTitle": "Sample Page",
            "score": 100,
            "modules": {
                "preceding": [
          ],
                "following": [
            {
                "template": "gallery",
                "properties": {
                    "columns": "3",
                    "order": "random"
                }
            },
            {
                "template": "include",
                "properties": {
                    "mode": "simple",
                    "order": "date"
                }
            }
          ],
                "secondary": [
          ],
                "aside": [
            {
                "template": "sample",
                "properties": {
                    "name": "name",
                    "code": ""
                }
            }
          ]
            }
        };
        // ]]>
    </script>
  </head>

  <body>
    <h1>This is a header</h1>

    <p>
      A <em>nice</em> paragraph, followed by some <code>code</code>.
    </p>

    <pre>
public static void main(String[] args) {
  System.out.println("Hello world!");
}
    </pre>

    <p>Let's test an entity: &euro;25.00</p>

    <script type="text/javascript">
        // <![CDATA[
        var a = 1;
        if (a < 3) document.write('<p>Badly formed content inserted by a script');
        // ]]>
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

And this is a basic template written using FreeMarker:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>${meshPage.title!}</title>
    <#if meshPage.description??>
      <meta name="description" content="${meshPage.description}" />
    </#if>
    ${meshPage.head!}
  </head>

  <body>
    <p>
      <a href="index.html">XHTML</a>
      <a href="index2.html">HTML</a>
      <a href="test.jsp">JSP</a>
    </p>

    ${meshPage.body}

    <ul>
      <#list meshPage.pageInfo.followingModules as m>
        <li>${m.template}</li>
      </#list>
    </ul>
  </body>
</html>

The tag library is still there anyway: I plan to refactor it to use the new page related stuff.