Basic architecture
Plex-XML is following the concept of the model-view-controller pattern (MVC). This is based on the idea of splitting an application into separate layers.
Plex-XML ist completely separating the business logic from the visual presentation. A configurable controller servlet links the other two layers together. Other frameworks that are following this pattern concept are such as Cocoon, Grails, Struts and Ruby on Rails.
A basic Plex-XML application consists of three parts:
- Business logic (Model): Your normal daily business with Plex or 2E functions that represent your business logic and the database.
- Presentation logic (View): Mostly consists of Plex functions that inherit from the Plex-XML pattern. These functions generate XML as output. It includes all the things you like to present to your user plus some information like e.g. field types, field length and labels.
- Controller: This part is implemented using a Java-Servlet and it handles the transformation from XML to HTML. In this part we usually use Eclipse as editor and you need to do adjust some configuration files to map Plex functions with web requests/responses and to define your application work flow.
All parts could be implemented on one machine or you could split them on different machines just like you know it from other Plex applications.
Below you can see one possible example of the data flow from the model to the view
See our tutorial for a short overview of the development steps in Plex and in Eclipse. It has never been so easy to get a well designed and ready to use web application out of Plex ;-)
