In every MVC framework I’ve tried (Rails, Merb, Waves, Spring, and Struts), the idea of a Request (and Response) is tied to the HTTP notion of a Request. That is, even if there is an AbstractRequest that is a superclass of Request, the AbstractRequest has things like headers, request method (GET, POST, etc.), and all of the other things tied to HTTP.
I’d like to support a request-response cycle over SMS, Twitter, email, or any other medium for which I can make an adapter. Is there a framework that does this particularly well?
The only other option I’ve thought of is creating, for example, a Twitter poller that runs in a separate thread and translates messages into local HTTP requests, then sends the responses back out.
If there were a good framework for multiple request media, what would routing look like? In Rails, the HTTP routing looks something like:
map.connect 'some/path/with/:parameter_1/:paramter_2', :controller => 'foo', :action => 'bar' How would a Twitter or SMS route look? Regular expressions to match keywords and parameters?
You seem to be working mostly with Java and/or Ruby, so forgive me that this answer is based on Perl :-).
I’m very fond of the Catalyst MVC Framework (http://www.catalystframework.org/). It delegates the actual mapping of requests (in the general, generic sense) to code via engines. Granted, all the engine classes are currently based on HTTP, but I have toyed with the idea of trying to write an engine class that wasn’t based on HTTP (or was perhaps tied to something like Twitter, but was separated from the HTTP interactions that Twitter uses). At the very least, I’m convinced it can be done, even if I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet.