I appreciate you've had lots of replies already - but tiles was the "killer"
feature for us in selecting struts. Please don't misunderstand that struts
isn't great anyway - we love it - but the addition of tiles has made
developing complex websites a breeze.
There is a very outdated "first-cut" of one of our production sites at:
http://www.mortgagesurgery.com/
... the full production version will be released very soon. This was
developed entirely using tiles and would have taken much, much longer
without tiles. It's using tiles everywhere - mainly using definitions from
tiles-defs.xml. The main menu is a header/body/footer tile with a
"niceBoxGreen" tile inserted that has a further body content - and each menu
bar option is a tile - so the hover/onclick code was only written once and
then used by inserting 6 tiles with different parameters. The tabbed-frame
on the first option was also created using tiles - this would have been a
nightmare without tiles - trust me this was first developed in ASP and
ASP.NET until I discarded both and looked for something better - and it now
uses the very wonderful struts.
Also see:
http://www.openaction.co.uk/jserv/
... ok it's just a pretty naff holding page but tiles allowed this to be
created in 1 hour. It has a tiles header/body/footer outer definition. A
further "niceBoxBlue" is inserted in the bodyContent that gives the "Coming
Soon!" box and this has a "titleString" property for the header and a
further "bodyContent" that contains the page with the text. This wouldn't
even be possible to do without really inelegant code and jsp includes.
I'm not saying these are great examples of what tiles can do - Cedric has
some superb portal and other configurable options that really show the power
of tiles.
My personal view is (and I'm sure someone will disagree!) - with tiles
available and so well-integrated into struts - you'd be really missing-out
by not using it - even for the simplest of sites.
There are loads of examples on tiles - I found Wellie Chao's article
(referenced in tiles resources) at the IBM site really helped me learn tiles
initially and also has a great justification for using tiles:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-strutstiles.html?loc=j
Hue.
-----Original Message-----
From: Southard, Don [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 18 February 2003 16:34
To: Struts User Group (E-mail)
Subject: Sell me on tiles
We are starting a fairly new project using struts. We are at a point where
we need to make a decision on using tiles or not using tiles. On one hand
it's not too hard to implement (one developer already has it working with
our project). On the other hand we haven't seen any added functionality
that would really make us want to go with this feature.
All that said can someone give me some brief points on why we should use
tiles?
-- L. Don Southard
303 218 4823
x4823
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