CABOOSE Philosophy Review

We promised at the beginning of this weblog that we would follow the KIS (Keep It Simple) principle. At times, it might seem that we have deviated from this. This entry is an attempt at simplifying the CABOOSE approach for those who are somewhat befuddled by the software engineering jargon and concepts.



A CABOOSE system with a model-view-controller architecture has five basic parts:

• The view, or rendered markup page which one will see in a web browser or viewing container.
• The page concerns, stencil tags, replacement variable, or placeholders in a user-defined form such as: #IDENTIFIER_FOR_REPLACEABLE_TEXT#. They are dynamically replaced with content from bundled methods based upon an XML-based configuration file. 
• The prepackaged controller kernel in the form of a servlet or JAX-RS web service. This regulates the flow of information between the model and the view based upon this same XML-based configuration file. 
• The model which contains the markup content with the substitute-able stencil tags which a browser might render, other external data sources, and the bundle of rendering methods which replace the placeholders in each page of markup with the appropriate content.
• The XML-based configuration file which maps between requested views and stencils plus page concerns and content rendering methods.

 

Hopefully, this will clear up some of the confusion. CABOOSE is an example of code reuse, in that, the controller is pre-written. Also, this greatly simplifies code development since that rendering method bundle is composed of simpler routines which return a formatted string. In the realm on JEE, many of the non-core JAVA concepts are abstracted out of the rendering methods. So, if you can write "Hello World" - style JAVA methods, you can use CABOOSE for web application development after a short and easy learning curve.

We apologize for letting the weblog sit idle for a few weeks. We have been working on a couple of papers again. The source for this project is available as a NetBeans archive in an earlier post. So, review and modify it as seems appropriate.

Happy Coding...Hunt...Peck...Think...La..La!!!

The CABOOSE Team