Hello. I would like to find out if anyone is using JSP to produce content
other than HTML and XML?
The reason I am asking is because there is a significant problem with the
JSP spec w/r to other content types; even HTML content types.
The problem I speak of is thus:
When a bean is called upon to produce content, it generally produces that
content as a string via a get method. This content type is text/plain.
However, the output of a JSP page is generally not text/plain, usually it is
text/html, and maybe it is something else, like say
x-application-www-form-urlencoded (or whatever that string is, too long for
my brain).
Have you ever had a bean produce a string like "The following <word> will
not show up in HTML."? And had problems displaying the content properly?
If so then this is the problem I speak of.
There are several ways of producing the content correctly:
The most common one I believe that is used is that each and every bean is
expected upon to format the content in the right manner.
The problem with this is, unfortunately, is that it makes it difficult to
write generic beans that produce content and are not aware of the context
they are used in. This seems anti-thetical to the purpose of writing a
"bean" which produces content and allows seperation of presentation and
business logic.
The second method I believe could be used would be to write a wrapper bean,
or wrapper mechanism. This seems to be pretty klunky, since I think the
only "real" way to do that would to be to make some sort of automatic
script/code generator that looked at all the beans you intended to use, and
created wrapper beans that would wrap all the get functions within those
beans to encode the content in the proper manner. And then of course
accessing the the get methods of the wrapper beans instead of the real bean
is problematic too.
The third mechanism I am aware of would be to put the transform code into
the JSP page itself; I think most people should recognize what a painful and
ugly solution that is.
My proposal (which, through maybe no one's fault, though nevertheless has
been ignored thusfar) is to make the JSP engine aware of the content-type of
the output page (it already is!!) and to match that against the content-type
of the bean producing the content.
If they don't match, then a filter should be applied. There is already a
mechanism to do this, and the JavaMail API already uses it effectively, it
is the Java Activation Framework (or JAF).
So please, tell me, what do you think of this problem, am I missing any
other mechanism for solving it right now, and what do you think of this
proposal? If you agree with me that this is a problem, how important does
it seem to you that it be fixed?
Thanks,
Taylor Gautier
Excite@Home Software Engineer
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