THANK YOU DON. You said it much better than I did.
Honestly, guys, the reaction here is a little... odd. I wanted to engage the dialog of how we might address known issues. Unless you've used the Struts 2 tags, it probably is hard to provide any real constructive feedback on this particular subject. Don outlines the problems very nicely. Ted's suggestion of building our own template language is definitely something I've also thought about. I've always said the ideal template language that we could use for our UI tags would be: - JSP-like - No scripplet support - Fast - Very lightweight (not giving the feeling we're requiring or endorsing one language over another) JXP could be a possible solution. So could building one in house. Or, perhaps, we could fork JXP for our needs and do both. The point is there is a real issue here, as Don outlined, as we should discuss ways to approach the problem. I personally think that JXP is a very good start, so I'd prefer to look at that before building our own. It may have issues (character encoding support), but a lack of activity or developer support is not a concern for me. Solving our known problems is my only concern - we can work out the technical, license, and community issues later. Now, to address Don's comments directly: Problem #1 (performance) isn't a huge issue for me - I figure we can solve that. Problems #2 and #3 are my main issue, which is why my criteria points to a JSP-like syntax since most applications use JSP. Let's pose a hypothetical: What if we could work with the JXP guys (or guy, as the case may be - who cares) to: - Ensure that it was fast - Have it emulate JSP 2.0 syntax - Address any other technical issues (ie: charsets) I think at that point JXP might really be something we'd want to consider. The alternative is building our own from scratch or possibly by forking something like FreeMarker. Anyone know how difficult that would be? Patrick > I think perhaps we are getting too deep into the > "solution" when we > don't understand or agree upon the problem. The > purpose of the Struts > tags is to provide a shortcut to create simple and > complex output. The > tags are usable in Velocity, Freemarker, and JSP. It > does this by > delegating to an independent component object model > that defines the > component as a Java object and uses Freemarker to do > the actual rendering. > > Therefore, the advantages of the current system are: > 1. Same tags in Velocity, Freemarker, and JSP > 2. Easy to customize a tag's output by overriding its > Freemarker template > > However, I do believe there are disadvantages: > 1. Performance overhead of the Freemarker template > engine, as opposed > o pure Java rendering used by toolkits like the > default JSF JSP tags > 2. Yet another template engine and expression > language to learn if you > se JSP or Velocity > 3. Little to no tool support for Freemarker > Furthermore, if you look at our templates, most of > them have little HTML > output themselves, making them harder to read as they > have more > Freemarker syntax than HTML. Template engines > generally do better when > the markup greatly outweighs the template syntax. > > The above disadvantages are big enough to me that I'm > interested in > finding an alternative to Freemarker. I want > something fast, intuitive, > and requires little to no extra learning on the part > of the developer. > Freemarker seems like a great template language for > general purpose web > pages, but for our tags, I'd like to find something > lighterweight. > > I don't have a solution myself, but as we discuss > possible solutions, > and I'm very happy we have an active discussion > going, please keep in > mind the problems we are trying to solve. > > Don --------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted via Jive Forums http://forums.opensymphony.com/thread.jspa?threadID=46468&messageID=94463#94463 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
