Snipped out the questions to be responded do.
On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Morgan Delagrange wrote:
>
> --- "Craig R. McClanahan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > From the viewpoint of Struts developers, however, it
> > would be MUCH more
> > painful to have to go through two transitions
> > (Struts --> Taglibs -->
> > Standard). If I can hide the transition to Taglibs
> > behind the existing
> > struts-xxxxx.tld files (so that user pages don't
> > have to be modified), I'm
> > OK with that. If I need to force users through two
> > conversions, then I'm
> > not going to be in favor of the proposed migration.
>
> I think I agree. It's probably better for the Struts
> taglibs to remain in their current location (if there
> are no objections). Maybe Taglibs will work on its
> own set of tags, if it seems appopriate.
>
I don't see a problem with that, although it is certainly feasible to play
with tag libraries from both sources. The taglibs JDBC tags, the
xsl:apply tag, and Pierre's new transformer tags proposal should all play
very nicely with Struts.
> >
> > There is also *substantial* overlap between the
> > functionality of these
> > tags and existing packages in jakarta-taglibs.
>
> Is this a good thing, bad thing, or just an
> observation?
In terms of taglibs, it's just an observation. One of the ground rules in
taglibs is that multiple approaches to the same functionality were
fine. The observation here is that the overlap is very large -- but the
approaches are certainly not identical, and that's fine.
> Historically, I don't know if Glenn's
> work or Struts taglibs came first, but while they
> address some of the same features, their approaches
> differ, sometimes significantly.
Struts began its existence at the end of May, 2000. I don't know when
Glenn started working on his libraries, but they were checked in to
taglibs later than that.
> (And, of course,
> Struts has features that Taglibs would not be able to
> implement outside the framework.) I'm very interested
> to see if the "Foundation" taglib moves closer to or
> further away from Struts. If it becomes even more
> similar, perhaps it is not even necessary. Of course,
> this is assuming that the Foundation tag libraries can
> stand on their own.
>
I may have missed some context here -- what's the "Foundation" taglib?
I'm also interested in how the JSR-052 effort pans out. The Struts tags
are one of the libraries being examined for ideas, but certainly not the
only ones -- there are several philosophical and technical approaches that
can be taken, and it's by no means clear which style is going to get
selected.
> > It should also be noted that all of these tag
> > libraries can easily be used
> > in non-Struts-based applications already -- simply
> > put the appropriate TLD
> > files in WEB-INF, and struts.jar into WEB-INF/lib,
> > and you are off and
> > running.
>
> Really, there is no configuration required to use the
> tag libraries by themselves? I guess I had assumed
> that the taglibs would barf if I didn't implement the
> Struts Servlet controllers. Well, I'll experiment
> with it a little and see how the tag libraries works
> stand-alone. Perhaps, if the tags do what I need,
> I'll use Struts, since Foundation is still in its
> infancy.
>
The only dependencies are those identified in my original message. The
bean, logic, and template libraries should be quite useable without the
framework. If you want to use the html library, though, you probably need
to buy in to the framework.
> However, I remain a little suspicious of using tag
> libraries coupled to frameworks when I'm not using the
> framework itself. There are no guarantees that future
> releases won't tighten the coupling, essentially
> making the tag library useless outside the framework.
>
Originally, all of the Struts tags were in a single tag library, and this
suspicion was pretty reasonable. One of the reasons we broke them out as
we did (bean and logic particularly) was to create libraries that could
potentially stand alone, and could be proposed to JSR-052 as one possible
basis for standard tags covering these functional areas.
Future plans for both the bean and logic libraries include some
interesting innovations (such as making them smart enough to extract
properties directly from JDBC RowSet or XML DOM objects, as well as trees
of JavaBeans). This will actually increase the usefulness of these tags
in conjunction with things like the JDBC taglibs.
Things that are dependent on the framework will be explicitly separated
into separate libraries, as the html tags are now.
> The Struts tag libraries don't seem to have any
> support for init parameters, is that right? Is that
> an oversight? If so, I would definitely consider
> contributing an update, if Struts turns out to be
> useful for me.
>
I haven't ever felt the need for initialization parameters for the tags
themselves (although the controller servlet has lots of them if you are
using the framework). What kinds of use cases are you thinking of where
these would be handy?
> - Morgan
>
> =====
> Morgan Delagrange
> Britannica.com
>
Craig
