Re: [Mav-user] a new view

[Joseph Dane]

Doug Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Hmmm...I don't want to rain on any parades, but I'm just wondering why
> you didn't want to use Velocity, as it accomplishes the same thing and
> it's already written and well-supported?

I do use Velocity, and am happy with it in the contexts in which I
use it.

However, it didn't seem to quite fit here.  I wanted the source pages
to be plain old HTML, to the greatest extent possible.  So consider
something like a role-sensitive navigation bar.  rather than

#if ($user.inRole('admin'))
  <a href=''>AdminFunctions</a>
#end
#if ($user.inRole('manager'))
  <a href=''>ManagerFunction</a>
#end
...

I wanted

 <a href='' ctl:if='${user.inRole("admin")}'>Admin Functions</a>
 ...

Also, I wanted to be able to leverage XML tools (XSLT) in interesting
ways.  If the control elements are expressed in XML, then I could
(for example) pass a template containing a looping construct through
an appropriate stylesheet (I'm referring here to an offline process)
and get a reasonable looking mockup.

Another thing: I figured I'd be using XSLT at runtime.  Both JSP and
vanilla Velocity are what you might call "text oriented".  Meaning
that the results of a template evaluation or JSP page evaluation
would have to be reparsed as XML on every request.  I wanted to avoid
that overhead.

Certainly I could have used Velocity.  I'm not terribly proud of
having increased the number of Java web technologies, and I always
figured I could resist the urge when it came upon me.  But it turned
out I was wrong.

-- 

joe


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