Stripes 1.5 Feature: Clean URLs

So I promised a list of some new features coming in Stripes 1.5. Since several of them require some explanation to really get the point across I decided to do a daily article about each of the major feature improvements and then one final article on the smaller things. I finally found a bit of time so here is the first one. Stripes 1.5 is coming along really well. The developers have been committing code like crazy the past month. We should be seeing a beta release really soon.

Disclaimer - We know that other web frameworks have had some of these features in some form or fashion so please don't comment with "ZZZ Framework has been doing that for years.". We know. We get it.

Clean URLs have been possible in Stripes for a while through an add on. However, with Stripes 1.5 they will be an optional feature in the core API. As you may or may not know currently you can define a URL Binding for a Stripes action one of 2 ways. You can let Stripes handle it by inspecting the package and class name and binding it for you or you can explicitly set it using the @UrlBinding annotation. With clean URLs @UrlBinding is required. The format is something like:

@UrlBinding("/action/blog/{$event}/{blog.id}")
public class BlogActionBean...

The resulting URL to edit a blog entry would be:

http://.../app/action/blog/edit/1234

If the event is null it is ignored as well as any given parameter. So a URL like:

http://.../app/action/blog

would result in calling the Default Handler for the BlogActionBean. Support for default parameter values are also available.

@UrlBinding("/action/blog/{$event}/{blog.id=1234")

So accessing the url

http://.../app/action/blog

blog.id will have a value of 1234 however if you pass in a blog.id value it will override the default. Default values for {$event} can also be given. This overrides the @DefaultHandler method if one exists. Otherwise, the @DefaultHandler method is executed.

If you still prefer extensions on your URLs, support for that is also available. The change to the URL binding is trivial:

@UrlBinding("/blog/{$event}/{blog.id}.action")

Stripes JSP tags <s:url />, <s:link />, and <s:form /> all support Clean URLs. For example:

<s:link beanclass="com.app.foo.BlogActionBean" event="edit">
    <s:param name="blog.id">1234</s:param>
    Edit
</s:link>

Will result in:

<a href="/app/action/blog/edit/1234">Edit</a>

And that is pretty much it for Clean URLs in Stripes 1.5. Very simple, elegant, and as good as the next guys. Possibly better? Let me know.