On 10/20/06, Bruno Melloni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It surprises me that a drag-and-drop struts aware IDE does not exist. A Struts drag-and-drop plug-in for Eclipse would be a very compelling product - the strength of (a current version of) Struts with the easy of use of Visual Studio... Many would pay for that.
It should not be quite so surprising, when you think a bit about what such a tool would actually have to do. Struts tags for JSP pages are not really standalone "components", so the tool would have to continually recompile the entire page and then ask it to render itself (simulating the runtime environment inside a servlet container) every time you dropped a new tag, or changed a property on an existing one. Given the speed of current generation JSP compilers (a lot better than it used to be, but still visible) that is still going to make it hard to provide a great user experience. Tools for component oriented frameworks like JSF get away without this, because the components can be rerendered indivisually. For example, in Java Studio Creator when you drop a new component, it just asks that component (and any children) to rerender, with no need to deal with the entire page. Craig
