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Flavour: The Latest Web Framework

There's a new feature-rich web framework that includes: It's called Flavour. Let me show you what it can do.

Flavour Templates

Flavour is a powerful, modern web framework with great tooling. You code your pages in HTML with CSS for styling. To inject data into the pages, use <html:text>: 
  Welcome back <html:text value="username">
Where does username come from? Flavour has a class bound to each HTML template, and it automatically invokes getters when there is a match. So in this case, it calls getUsername() in the bound class.

Pre-Made Components

Flavour makes heavy use of components. You can use the ones it provides and create your own. In the example above, you can see a Flavour pre-made component. html:text is a component that computes a value and inserts it into the page.

Other components allow for conditionals (std:if) and looping (std:foreach).

For interactivity, your page needs to be able to respond to events. event:click let's you specify which method gets called when an element is clicked: 

  <button event:click="compute()">Compute<button>

Custom Components

You can define your own components, then use them in your pages or even to build other components.

A Flavour component is the combination of an HTML template with a class. Just like with page templates, methods mentioned on the page are invoked from the class bound to the template.

Say you have a custom button you want to use throughout the website, with consistent behavior when clicked. Simply create your CustomButtonComponent class, give it a name via the BindElement annotation, and bind it to customButton.html.

Then you can reuse the button in other HTML templates. First, include it at the top of the template: 

  <?use component-lib:com.mycompany.components?>
Then insert the component using its prefix and name (from BindElement). Place it on the page and position it using normal HTML mechanisms. 
  <component-lib:button/>

Easy REST Calls

Invoking REST services can be a maintenance headache: Flavour eliminates most of these sources of error. Say you have a JAX-RS service with an interface Math, deployed at /mathapi. On the server side, you've already defined the paths and parameters in this interface. To invoke it, use Flavour to create a client-side implementation, and call the methods like you would any Java method: 
  Math math = RESTClient.factory(Math.class).createResource("mathapi");
  int answer = math.add(2, 3);
Flavour handles all of the complexity -- marshaling and unmarshaling parameters, invoking the REST service, and error handling. (If things go wrong, an exception is thrown.)

Further Reading

Last modified on 25 Nov 2020 by AO

Copyright © 2024 Andrew Oliver