Thanks for the helpful response Scott. > Tiles and Sitemesh are both page decoration tools, but they go about > things very differently.
I would consider Tiles more of a page composition tool and Sitemesh a page decoration tool. > From my (limited) understanding, Tiles you have to 'push' everything > into it. If you want a title - you need to specify it in tiles-def.xml. > I'm not sure what Tiles gives you that you couldn't achieve with a big > velocity template & a properties file to pull the value in from. Generally in your tiles definition file you specify not only text properties to place in the template (eg title) but what *tiles components* should be used (eg 'news' tile, 'advertisement tile and 'log in' tile should appear on the right side in that order). In a velocity template + properties file the template specifies what properties should be used where. The template also defines what other templates to include (as does jsp include). With the Tiles approach this 'controller' functionality is removed from the template making the template more reusable. > However, the distinction is that you can only have one decorator per > page, rather than lots of 'tiles'. Mostly this fits with web design, as > usually there is one rather large 'content' area, with some other > navigation around it. Yeah, this is the key difference. Tiles provides a mechanism to arrange *many* self contained tiles components on a page. This is essential for complex pages (think portal site). For example I can specify a list of tiles to appear in any area of the page in a particular order by using a simple iterator tile. The iterator tile will add each tile in order, one on top of the other. This is incredibly powerful for page composition. All Tiles does is provide a simple way to define what reusable tiles you want on a particular page (tiles-def.xml) making composing pages from components easy. > You could even use Tiles inside your decorator (decorators as just JSP > files) to do this logic. Great idea. Or use it to compose the 'content' area from many tiles and then decorate that with Sitemesh. > That's it - the whole page. The 'jiraform' decorator decorates the form > box, and the normal decorator decorates the whole page. In your example the form box (a page component) defines what decorator to use. This limits its reusability because it is *not* decoupled from its decorator. However, I understand that this does not have to be defined here. > Anyhow - I'd suggest that you look at Sitemesh. It doesn't do what you > are asking - but I think that Sitemesh and other tools means that you > don't actually want to do that ;) I certainly will look at using it for the task it was designed for. The two tools have some overlap but the problem they solve is different. Sitemesh can easily enforce a consistent look to a web site by decorating the content pages. Tiles can help compose complex pages by arranging simple components. John ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: Parasoft Error proof Web apps, automate testing & more. Download & eval WebKing and get a free book. www.parasoft.com/bulletproofapps1 _______________________________________________ Opensymphony-webwork mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opensymphony-webwork
