First of all I'm happy to see my presentation was well-received, and has provoked some discussion.

But, regarding my Presentation Taglib, keep in mind that what I presented was a mere sneak preview. It's really premature and pointless to start discussing it's features (or lack thereof) on the basis of this.
I won't stop you if you do, but I won't bother either.


What's more serious, is that people are making claims about (supposedly) shortcomings of JSTL/EL, based on poor knowledge or understanding. Therefore, I'll provide some counterexamples below to disprove these claims:

<Kees J:>
the forEach tag can be useful. but when people start using it they
will need the exact functions that are in the mmbase taglib
-know the size of the list
-know if the list is not empty
-know if this is the first / last element

those simple functions are not provided by the jstl (maybe the flow
taglibs are for that purpose).

Example 1: <mp:list path="news" var="newsitems"/>

Size of the list:
    ${newsitems.size}

Note: the List interface does not provide a method getSize(), but the wrapper-class used by the mp:list tag does.

Test if the list is empty:
${empty newsitems}

Note: empty is part of the EL syntax. It tests for null values and empty strings, collections or arrays.

The first/last element:
<c:forEach items="${newsitems}" var="newsitem" varStatus="status">
<c:if test="${status.first}">Print this in the first iteration only</c:if>
Print this in each iteration.
<c:if test="${status.last}">Print this in the last iteration only</c:if>
</c:forEach>


<Michiel M>
The other thing that I would very much miss is the <mm:content / escaper
functionallity, which perhaps would be a detail, but actually quit
essential, because generally it is wrong to just put your field to the page,

HTML-escaping a field value: <c:out escapeXML>${newsitem.body}</c:out>

Note: content/escaper functionality is easily implemented using tags that take the tag body as input. Chances are a taglib that suits your needs already exists.

A good place to shop around for taglibs is this:
    http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Projects/TagLibraries

For a quick but comprehensive overview of EL/JSTL features I highly recomment this document:
http://www.jadecove.com/jstl-quick-reference.pdf


Regards,
Rob van Maris

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