Re: Barracuda: case-insensitive event names?

I had a feeling it might have something to do with this.

My opinion is that the event names should be "opaque"--the user may see
them, but they shouldn't necessarily be meaningful (i.e. part of a URL
that the user would actually type into the browser's address field). To
me, just the fact that they end in ".event" (by default) suggests that
they'd probably be unfamiliar to users.

Typically, to get to your fictitious Web application, wouldn't it make
the most sense to allow the user to enter the URL
http://www.myhost.com/myapp ? I would expect a URL of this form to be
the entry point for the application (it's also less typing for the
user). This is actually pretty easy to do in Barracuda, especially if
the application has only one entry point. I just have a
DefaultEventGateway that redirects to the URL of the event that displays
the "main" application page. (The mechanism I use is a bit
oversimplified--it actually redirects any request that wasn't handled by
another event listener to the "main" event--but it illustrates that the
mechanism can work.)

I'd imagine this mechanism could be extended to redirect various URLs to
various events, and I think that would be a more useful capability than
case-insensitive event names would be. This can certainly be implemented
with a DefaultEventGateway, but I wonder if there would be another, more
elegant way of doing this.

Having said all that, it doesn't seem that implementing a
case-insensitive event name mechanism would introduce any real problems.
I'm not sure how the event name-to-class mapping is implemented
internally, but if it uses something like a HashMap, I would think this
would be easy enough to implement: Simply perform something like
toLowerCase() on a key before insertion or comparison. If the mapping
uses something like Class.forName(), then adding a HashMap to map the
toLowerCase() version of the event name to its "true" capitalization
should work well.

Cheers,
Jeremy

On Thu, 2002-12-12 at 22:09, Jacob Kjome wrote:

> Hi Jeremy,
> 
> Why you little.... I mean....  heh :-)
> 
> It is just because if someone were to type the URL to some page, they
> really shouldn't have to care about the case-sensitivity of the event
> name.  If they know the name, they should be able to fire the event.
> 
> For instance....
> 
> http://www.myhost.com/myapp/MyBigLongEventName.event
> 
> Now, besides the fact that I created a very cumbersome event name, a
> user would have difficulty with this since they would have to remember
> to use Java coding standards for classes when typing the name of the
> event.  Besides, that, they could miss the SHIFT key and get most of
> the case right, but one letter in lower case when it should have been
> in upper and now they get an "event not found" message.  Why not be
> able to do something like...
> 
> http://www.myhost.com/myapp/mybiglongeventname.event
> 
> or
> 
> http://www.myhost.com/myapp/MyBigLongEventname.event
> 
> or
> 
> http://www.myhost.com/myapp/MyBiglongeventName.event
> 
> etc....
> 
> We all know what event they are trying to fire, don't we?  Why should
> we care that they typed it just so?  Does that make things more
> clear?  Now that it is clear, do you feel it is a valid point?  If it
> is a valid point, are there any gotcha's we might run into by allowing
> for this?
> 
> Jake

-- 

Jeremy L. Rosenberger * [email protected]
http://www.frii.com/~jeremy/

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