currently my main focus at work is an order automation project integrating over ten legacy systems. currently the flow through the ordering process is coded in a stateful business layer but we are now moving it to a declarative format similar to bpml.

all of our struts actions used to make calls into the stateful order processor and will therefore have to be modified. while reviewing our collection of about thirty struts actions i came to the conclusion that other than dealing with formbeans and calls to the orderprocessor, our struts actions weren't doing much.

so i've decided to make the struts actions declarative as well. we have created a single struts action to replace the old ones. this new struts action reads in a configuration file. that file specifies which processor methods to call under which circumstances. the file also allows us to specify custom classes that handle the conversion of struts form beans to business value objects and vice versa.

i may post more details - maybe some diagrams - if people show some interest. i would like to know if anyone else has any experience connecting their struts config to a bpml like process xml file.