"Craig R. McClanahan" wrote:
>
[ snip ]
>
> * My personal preference for the presentation layer is JSP (and has
> been since long before I adopted a "sun.com" email address :-), for
> several reasons:
[ snip ]
>
> * Custom tags - can be used to encapsulate sophisticated
> functionality in a variety of ways, including smarter generation
> of HTML to configuring application functionality). See the
> Struts Framework project <http://jakarta.apache.org/struts>
> to get a feel for what's possible. (And Struts/Turbine/Barracuda
> each offers an alternative approach to the organization of the
> business logic as well.)
For what it's worth, I think that custom tags are the thing
that really saves JSP. On my last project, we were able to
encapsulate all logic into a servlet framework and custom tags.
(Actually, our framework ended up looking very similar to struts
which I think is a very natural evolution of the smart-servlet
design.)
We had _no_ Java code in any of our JSP pages. This was a
goal from the beginning of the project and it would have been
impossible without custom tags.
As it turned out, for many of the custom tags we were able
to write web-developer versions that didn't require the full back-end
application server. Our web developers were then able to run tomcat
locally to help develop their pages and see what they looked like as
they developed. We were fortunate that most of our web designers
steered away from WYSIWYG tools... even though they did use web edit
tools like Homesite. The more savvy web guys were even able to make
the tool integration look pretty seamless.
I'll be curious to see where the JSP spec evolves next. To
me it seems logical to start incorporating more tags along the lines
of the current bean tags. Iteration and other control structures
seems like the most common part of the wheel that tag libraries seem
to be re-inventing. Standard versions sure would be nice.
-Paul
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