I just discovered JSTL three days ago and when I realized what it was aiming at, I just got blasted away! It's a very impressive set of standard actions, well written and with just the right set of actions that is needed in just about every jsp page. I've been pondering moving to Velocity earlier. I really like JSP, but I also can see it's drawbacks, therefore the reasons to move to Velocity before JSTL actually seemed reasonable, but after reading the JSTL spec from front to back in two evenings... I mean, wow! The EL and everything is just fantastic. Well, I don't care to much for the SQL parts, since they don't belong in the views, but hey, I don't really mind it being there. But...
There's one thing that looked really strange to me about the url parts of the spec. An url can be declared on the form (from the spec section 7.1): <c:url value="http://acme.com/exec/register"; var="myUrl"> <c:param name="name" value="${param.name}"/> <c:param name="country" value="${param.country}"/> </c:url> <a href=’<c:out value="${myUrl}"/>’>Register</a> The first part looks great. Defining an url and reusing it, I really find it great to be able to move the urls out of the html rendering in a consistent manner. But then when it should be printed... The page variable myUrl is printed in the <a/> elements href attribute with href=’<c:out value="${myUrl}"/>’!?!? I mean this isn't even correct xml in any way. Even if the <c:out> would have been just plain text, which it isn't, it still quite ugly. But it's even worse, as far as I know "<" isn't even allowed in an attribute, even less so trying to nest an xml document element hierarchy within it! So what I'm asking is this: is there any other (better) way to perform this action, perhaps with a tag <myTag:hyperLink value="${myUrl}"/> or something like that. But shouldn't this really have been in the spec? Any opinions? =========================================================================== To unsubscribe: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "signoff JSP-INTEREST". For digest: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "set JSP-INTEREST DIGEST". Some relevant FAQs on JSP/Servlets can be found at: http://archives.java.sun.com/jsp-interest.html http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/faq.html http://www.esperanto.org.nz/jsp/jspfaq.jsp http://www.jguru.com/faq/index.jsp http://www.jspinsider.com
