Michael Jouravlev wrote:
So, the question I am asking: what are the real benefits of using
Tiles if I use JSP includes + XHTML/CSS for layout/styling? Can most
of Tiles features be implemented with XHTML/CSS?
I guess some of it comes to a personal preference in regard to the
dynamic content stuff that I didn't see you mention (or I read over your
post too quickly).
For example what about things where your "header" section needs a title
to display in the html, or what if you quickly want to change around
what pages get 'injected' (for lack of a better word) with a particular
div? To accomplish this without something like tiles, you 1) have to set
up certain things in the request in your Action before you go to your
page and 2) you have to have jstl logic to decide whether or not to
display the information. Personally I find it much cleaner to have this
stuff defined in one place. So for example, lets look at your master
layout...
<jsp:include page="masterLayout.jsp">
<div class="content">
//all your content
</div>
masterlayout.jsp
----------------
<div class="header"><jsp:include page="header.jsp"/></div>
<div class="footer"><jsp:include page="footer.jsp"/></div>
header.jsp
----------
SOME COOL LOGO
{ Dynamic "MY SUPER TITLE" }
SOME OTHER LOGO
more other images
-------------------
Now in the above, how are you going to get your title into this header
jsp? The only way I know of is that you'd have to set it up ahead of
time in your action. What if someone decides that title needs to change?
Personally I'd rather find all the titles in one place
(tiles-definitions.xml) than have to find what Action it it is in and
where in the Action you set it up.
Actually tiles just saved me a lot of time in a project I'm working on
where each of the pages belongs to a certain "tab section" For example,
'post' is a link on the menu bar which is part of the "notification tab"
section. Because the business requirements changed so much laying out
this stuff was so easy as the powers-that-be changed their mind about
what should be part of what tab ragion. Since you can extend layouts, it
was a quick change to extend a different tab-layout in the
tiles-definitions.
Also, another thing I like is when I want to change the layout of a page
very quickly. For example, I often have a "popup" layout (doesn't
contain the header and footer and other decoration). If I want to
quickly change the resulting page to use this layout, it's a 1 second
change in my tiles-definitions. This becomes even more clean when
sometimes this page has the popup layout but other times the page is
used with the normal layout. Using Tiles you can set up a definition as
yourpage.popup and yourpage.normal. Now, in your struts-config you
might have action mappings that foward to "popup" and "normal" - the
content never changes - only the layout. To me this is more clean than
having JSTL logic in the JSP page to decide whether or not to display
certain things. At any given time I can quickly change my mind and it's
super easy... I simply modify one definition file instead of stripping
out or putting back in JSTL logic to hide or show sections.
The other thing is that I'm still not convinced of the magic and wonders
of css for layout. Personally to me it's often black magic voodoo. Sure,
I'm sure some will say it's easy ...bla blah... BS I say. Complex
layouts with css is ANYTHING but easy or intuitive. Sure for simple
stuff it's fine, but I'll be willing to race almost any average css user
in designing some complex layouts. They can use only css and divs. I can
use tables. I bet you I'll be done much faster and it'll work in all
browsers and it will be easy to understand (ok yes it will 'look' more
cluttered, but it'll still be intuitive.) Ok done ranting about css
positioning:)
Lastly, I think sitemesh is great, but I've haven't checked in a while
to see if they still buffer everything before outputting the displaying.
This was a huge performance hit in my last application since we had some
huge (yes, arguably, too large) reporting jsps. Last time I used
Sitemesh, sitemesh looked like it still had to hold everything in a
buffer before decorating. You can imagine the memory problem that could
occur for some very large jsps. If Sitemesh fixed this one problem, I'd
use it over Tiles.
PS: when you mention:
Michael>>>>>
<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-tiles"; prefix="tiles" %>
<tiles:insert template="layout.jsp">
<tiles:put name="title" value="This is the title." />
<tiles:put name="header" value="header.jsp" />
<tiles:put name="body" value="body.jsp" />
</tiles:insert>
I still have to specify all these <tiles:put> tags that refer to
particular header/footer files (Definition solves that, see below).
<<<< /michael
The "all these <tiles:put>" things in the above is only true for things
that 'change' like the body.jsp and the title. Probably things like the
header and footer would be part of the main.layout which you would be
extending in your definition. (You typically set up a few layouts and
all your pages then extend the ones they need.)
And also remember you still have to deal with getting a dynamic title
into certain sections. You often can't always have it be in your main
content page so it somehow has to become part of your header section
(imagine the case I mentioned where you want to show a title between
certain header images.. which is quite common.)
--
Rick
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