Apologies if this it _too_ off-topic, but I think it might be worth
mentioning. In the same vein as my "web framework is better than
yours" we, in the office, have been having a fairly heated
discussion about which way we go technology wise next. Over the past
six months we have been migrating our front-ends from .net to Java
based technologies, and Struts in the main. Now a new manager has
come on board and he wishes us to revisit the reasons why we choose
Struts. Now I was the main instigator as I have been using Struts
for the past 3 years and I had previously been using an in-house MVC
(urrgh!). I like MVCs and especially Struts, mainly because it fits
my mindset of seperation. The main critisism (and the point of this
missive) is that the argument I keep on facing is:
"JSP/HTML/XHTML is a messy mark-up. It is cumbersome to refactor and
a bugger to work out. We could use Tapestry or JSF and forget about
HTML."
So, I've gone back and revisited our JSPs to see if this criticism is
correct; and to be honest it is. I am a fairly careful coder and I
adhere to the XHTML standards as diligently as possible, but it still
looks pretty confusing. Now the main issue is that we really (a team
of three) never had the time to get the basics right prior to
launching into the migration from .net to Struts. By the basics, I
mean working out an encompassing* CSS. So, I've gone back and re-
factored the JSP to use an encompassing* CSS document, and lo and
behold the code (JSP) is cleaner and so much better to work with.
Now maybe everyone but me and my team uses an encompassing* CSS
throughout their JSP as standard and never deviates from that path,
but if you don't; take a little while to research what it can do for
your development. I have still to convince this new manager that
Struts is the way, but I've removed one of the major arguments to
going down the Tapestry/JSF route for now (not that they don't use
CSSes)!
* By "encompassing', I mean no formatting is used directly in the JSP
where it can be deferred to a style.
Cheers
Christopher Marsh-Bourdon
www.marsh-bourdon.com
AIM: marshbourdon
