An Architect's View

The sample application which I'm using to illustrate my Fusebox and Mach II framework comparison talk now has a Model-Glue variant! That's seven variants altogether:

• Traditional Fusebox
• MVC Fusebox
• OO Fusebox
• Simple Mach II
• Refactored Mach II using design patterns
• Fusebox + Tartan
• Model-Glue

I'll be making the code available for download after the CFUNITED conference. I still need to add some readme files and maybe tidy up some of the code. So what was it like building a Model-Glue application? Not bad once I got over a few "Mach II-isms" - mostly XML syntax problems caused by a lack of familiarity with Model-Glue. I did find one big hole in Model-Glue tho': there was no way to declaratively pass arguments to views, such as you typically do with Fusebox (XFAs - eXit FuseActions) and I've started doing with Mach II as well. I mentioned this to Joe and he seemed to think it was a good idea so I modified a couple of core files and sent the edits to him. Expect to see view arguments in a future release of the framework! I do like the clean, consistent approach of controllers listening to messages and event handlers broadcasting messages and all communication done via the event object (which becomes the view state). Where I would notify a listener in Mach II to get me some data (or invoke a component in Fusebox), I broadcast a message instead and name it "needXYZ" to indicate the view needs XYZ data. The relevant controller listens for needXYZ and usually calls getXYZ. It makes the XML read quite nicely. Thoughts?