As many of you know, there is a current JSR (#52) to produce a standard
tag library for JSP pages. Because these tags will be standard, the JSP
page compilers can be enhanced to recognize them (just as they recognize
standard tags like <jsp:useBean>) and generate optimized Java code.
The initial scope of the JSP standard tag library effort focuses on
conditionals, iteration, and expression languages. As you can imagine,
there is a lot of functional overlap between these tags and the Struts
tags in the "bean" and "logic" tag libraries. Struts tags, as well as
existing tag libraries from many other existing packages, have been
examined but -- as you might expect in a standardization process -- the
results are not identical to any of the original libraries. Instead, the
JSR-052 expert group has tried to distill the best ideas from all of the
existing libraries.
In addition, the JSR-052 expert group has made an "early access" version
of the reference implementation for these tags available through the
Jakarta Taglibs project. You can download this library (and scan the
documentation for it) at:
http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/doc/jsptl-doc/intro.html
I would suggest that Struts developers begin to familiarize themselves
with these tags, because we will be faced with future choices on
encouraging (or not encouraging) a migration to the standard tags once
they become available in final form. NOTE: The EA depends on JSP 1.2
features, so you will need a servlet container (like Tomcat 4.0) that
supports the new JSP spec to try the library out.
The JSR-052 expert group is *very* interested in feedback on the design
(and implementation) of the standard tag library. Because Struts users
have become pretty familiar with how powerful custom tags can be, I expect
that our community will be able to provide some pretty high quality
comments :-). Comments should be directed to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Craig
