Ryan Lea wrote:
Just wondering if anyone has used/tried/investigated all 3 of these as views (from MVC) and has any opinions on them??
I tried JSP back in December and, boy, I really tried to like it but had some issues that clashed with my way of thinking.
I had one "top level" template with smaller templates nested inside it, and the only way I could pass beans to the JSP was through the global request collection. Therefore, if the name of a bean expected by one nested template clashed with the name of a bean expected by another template in the same request, the first would get overwritten.
In Perl I used to populate nested templates, capture their output in a string, then embed that string inside its container/parent template... But I couldn't capture the output of a JSP into a string without forking an internal HTTP request (insanely inefficient!). All I could do was capture the output of a JSP into its container using <jsp:include>, and that meant the variables/beans that populated all levels of all nested JSPs had to exist in the same global request namespace at the same time...
I was also uncomfortable about the fact a JSP is essentially a servlet, and it executes. That's more active than I wanted for an MVC view component. I wanted the view to be a static template that my program controls/populates, not the other way round. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog instead of the dog wagging the tail. I couldn't really control JSP. Instead, _it_ imported beans, drew values from those beans, included nested JSPs (executing them and capturing their output). This control wasn't available to my servlet. JSP was like a runaway child (?)
Ah well, that's probably just the way my brain's wired. Everyone has preferred ways of thinking, right? So I'm not saying JSP's inherently bad, just that it clashed with my programming style.
I love Velocity because it's simpler. Einstein said everything should be as simple as possible, but never simpler. Simplicity is an expression of power, the power to be direct. Complications arise because there wasn't enough power to be direct/simple in the first place. Oh, and about people saying JSP is faster, I've read lots to the contrary, saying Velocity is actually faster, certainly for simple templates, by as much as 40%. Can't remember where I got that statistic.
There are some great comments here:
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1006966.html
Also, wasn't the reason for JSP's invention to rival technologies like ASP and PHP in the late 90s? In those days, embedding code in your HTML seemed all the rage... was popular with page designers. But we're programmers, right? Web applications are programs, not pages.
www.rightmove.co.uk <http://www.rightmove.co.uk/> - the UK's number 1 property website
Interesting. I'm returning to London in a few months - will need an apartment. Oh, and a job :)
Mark Hawkes It Just Works Software 17 Colborne Street East, Suite 202 Orillia, Ontario L3V 1T4 1-705-326-4254
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