> Would people be happy to see this tag library donated to jakarta-taglibs?
yes!
- eduard/o
James Strachan wrote:
>
> I'd like to donate an open source JSP tag library I've been working on for
> while to jakarta taglibs. I would need to get permission of the client I
> developed it with first to change licence to ASF - I just wanted to check if
> people would like it to be added to jakarta first to save me jumping
> needlessly through some legal hoops.
>
> "xtags" implements an XSLT-like language in JSP allowing XML to be styled
> and processed from directly within a JSP page using XSLT and XPath
> techniques.
>
> Currently its all on SourceForge here:
>
> http://xtags.org
>
> There's the reference documentation there too such as the full tag
> reference:
>
> http://xtags.org/xtags.html
>
> The easiest way to get a handle on what xtags is and how it works is to
> download it, try out the example web apps and go through some example JSP
> sources. A brief summary now follows.
>
> xtags uses XPath expressions rather like XSLT does to allow you to process
> XML in a powerful way, branching, iterating and formatting XML. xtags also
> uses XSLT-like tags.
>
> Loops are as follows (an optional variable name can be specified to define a
> scriptlet expression inside the loop):-
> <xtags:foreach select="expression">
> ...
> </xtags:foreach>
>
> Simple conditional branching is:-
> <xtags:if test="booeanExpression">
> ...
> </xtags:if>
>
> More complex conditional branching is:-
> <xtags:choose>
> <xtags:when test="booeanExpression">
> ...
> </xtags:when>
> <xtags:when test="booeanExpression2">
> ...
> </xtags:when>
> <xtags:otherwise>
> ...
> </xtags:otherwise>
> </xtags:choose>
>
> Expression evaluation
> <xtags:valueof select="expression"/>
>
> Defining scriptlet variables
> <xtags:variable name="variableName" select="expression"/>
>
> All these tags are very similar to their XSLT equivalents, so anyone who's
> done XSLT before should find them familiar.
> There's also an <xtags:style> tag which behaves quite like the existing XSL
> taglib in Jakarta, performing a complete XSL transform in one tag.
>
> XPath expressions can use variables with the syntax $foo.
> xtags binds these variables to either page/request/session/application scope
> attributes or request parameters which allows xtags to be used as a
> conditional logic scripting language too - even without the existence of XML
> documents.
>
> For example, the following JSP would branch logically based on the value of
> the (say) request parameter "option":-
>
> <xtags:choose>
> <xtags:when test="$option='a'">
> current option is 'a'
> </xtags:when>
> <xtags:when test="$option='b'">
> current option is 'b'
> </xtags:when>
> <xtags:otherwise>
> no valid option selected
> </xtags:otherwise>
> </xtags:choose>
>
> xtags even supports the <xtags:stylesheet> <xtags:template> and
> <xtags:applytemplates> tags from XSLT too though the body of a template must
> be an Action object or a seperate JSP file.
>
> To close with here's a hello-world type bit of xtags JSP which styles any
> RSS news feed and prints the headline stories with hypertext links into a
> bullet list. (It actually prints the top Java news articles from
> moreover.com). Though this may look similar to XSLT, remember that any JSP
> tags or scriptlets can be used anywhere in this page:-
>
> <html>
> <body>
> <h1>Hello RSS</h1>
> <ul>
>
> <xtags:document
> uri="http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?c=Java%20news&o=rss";>
> <xtags:foreach select="//item">
> <xtags:variable name="url" type="string" select="link"/>
> <li>
> <a href="<%= url %>">
> <xtags:valueof select="title"/>
> </a>
> -
> <xtags:valueof select="description"/>
> </li>
> </xtags:foreach>
> </xtags:document>
>
> </ul>
> </body>
> </html>
>
> Would people be happy to see this tag library donated to jakarta-taglibs?
>
> James
