JspAlternatives

Now I've used JakartaVelocity to generate Java source and its a short hop to generating HTML. VTL is very simple to read and use and to my mind keeps the mark-up and the dynamic stuff well separated which is nice. The ease of using (sometimes psuedo)Java in either (especially JSP) is quite worrying since the view can more easily end up knowing all sorts of stuff that it shouldn't, and why bother with it in the view when your servlet can do all the grunt work in plain old Java.

I always apply the mantra "how will I test that the stuff we write works?" these days to any new technology. Apply this to JSP - I need to deploy a web-application into a web-server to test a simple piece of HTML is generated? That just doesn't sound very quick to do, that deployment cycle is going to take half a minute every time and I can't easily get at the code I want to test.

It's dependent on using Java code generation technology that's in the container so to even start to fix any problems I have to let the JSP run and fail and then take the code that's been generated and look in that to see where the problem is. So I can't really ever test the code I have written since I don't write any directly!

Then I looked at Velocity and servlets. I don't really need a container - If the view generation classes can plug into a generic servlet then since I'm not testing the servlet and just the generation logic I can just call the view classes directly. I simply write my templates run my Java program and see what HTML is generated there and then. Nice.

Then I looked at Joe's Walnes Jelly and his 3 stage path from JSP to Velocity to Jelly. His one problem with Velocity is what I call its anti-duplication expressions. Basically if you find yourself writing the same snippet of mark-up again and again you can use a simple tag in JSP to define that mark-up and then use the simple tag every where instead. There is the concept of a Velocity macro however Joe was less impressed with it for reasons unknown...

I had a look at Maven and its use of Jelly and its looks like it could be the best of both worlds, but its a little bleeding edge for our application.

So then I bought the book "XP for web projects" over Christmas here's way they say in XpForWebProjects

You've done a lot of exploring, which is cool. You've almost certainly learned something you needed to know. Now for a question that will put this learning to use : what is, for you, the simplest thing that could possibly work ?³rev³2³JspAlternative ³³date³December 31, 2002³host³³agent³Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)³JspAlternatives

StevenJOwens?

StevenJOwens?