Playing with Model-Glue Unity

After watching Joe Rinehart's video on the coolness of Model-Glue: Unity, I had to download and play a bit. Pretty amazing stuff. I liked how easy it was to set up some basic functionality for a simple table. The combination of MG, ColdSpring and Reactor is quite powerful. The scaffolding (where it automatically built some event-handlers and views) part was really impressive.

The only problem I had with some of this type of automation is that I didn't feel like I had access to a separated model that I would be able to reuse elsewhere. Some of the Generic Database Modeling that MG has built into the controller would be difficult to use if I want to take MG out of the equation and reuse a part of  my model. But perhaps I didn't play long enough to get a full understanding.

I briefly looked at the idea of "actionpacks" and read through the one Email Service actionpack that is available through the SVN site. This looks really cool. The Email Service is a prebuilt model that is used by simple calls to an API (e.g., setTo, setSubject()...). It comes with the necessary ColdSpring config xml, the MG Controller and the MG xml. This little actionpack would be very easy to adapt to Mach-II. It is a good example of how a part of a model can be written and reused.

Good job Joe and everyone who contributed.

Note on using Model-Glue or Mach-II with ColdSpring and Reactor

Just a reminder that in order to use Model-Glue or Mach-II with ColdSpring and Reactor you must get the latest version of all of the above. The most recent versions of MG and M-II are available at their respective web sites as they are the most recent 'stable' version. For ColdSpring and Reactor, however, you'll have to go to version control repositories. ColdSpring has the CVS login details on its website (Eclipse has a built in CVS checkout client). Reactor is harder to find. I downloaded the Tortoise SVN client (google it, download it, install it). It's repository is at svn://alagad.com/reactor/trunk (this is listed in the Reactor documentation).

There have been a lot of recent changes to the repository versions of both ColdSpring and Reactor so there is no guarantee you can get this combo to work. I do have a version of CS and Reactor that work with at least one sample application (see previous blog entry). And remember that they are both in alpha, meaning issues are being found and fixed all the time.

I'll be happy to email zips of these to whoever needs it. I'd post them here, but I don't think this free blog gives me enough file space or bandwidth. If you need them emailed, leave a comment and I can get to your email address.

Mach-II / ColdSpring / Reactor port of Brian's bookstore

Last week Brian Kotek posted a Model Glue / ColdSpring / Reactor version of his bookstore sample application. One of the comments was from Sami Hoda and how he hasn't been able to find a Mach-II / ColdSpring / Reactor sample application. I volunteered to port Brian's app to Mach II. So here is the Mach-II / ColdSpring / Reactor port of Brian's bookstore.

Converting from M-G to M-II is fairly straight forward. I didn't touch the the model cfcs, the Reactor config or the ColdSpring config. Because Brian reassigned the Model-Glue view state variables in each view template, those were easy fixes (Find 'viewstate.getvalue'; Replace with 'event.getArg'). The biggest difference is that Model Glue has onRequestStart capabilities in each of its controllers. I used Mach II plugins to mimick those.

The install should be easy enough. There is a readme file included to help you get going.