March 20, 2003
JSTL make JSP viable again?
Will JSTL/JSP2.0 make Velocity advocates think again about using JSP for new projects or is it too little too late?
If you saw Velocity and JSP2 in a project intermixed depending upon the situation what would you think? Is that a bad design strategy? Do you think it would be inconsistant or swiss army like efficient, I'm not sure what I'd think, I can see it both ways.
It might worthwhile to pick and choose your view in certain situations perhaps, they dont really have to be mutually exclusive.
Right now I'm thinking JSTL/JSP2 is pretty cool if they have to be mutually exclusive I'd choose it, but I'm open for dialogue.
Posted by
Andre Mermegas
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March 20, 2003 12:00 PM
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JSTL is too much too late. I mean really, tags to do SQL queries? That's so 1995 ColdFusion. I think it's just another case of Sun continuing to push the JSP solution that is just a bad design.
Haha yeah, I was thinking the same thing about the SQL tags, but I just dismissed them, and looked at the other stuff, which seems pretty good.
I agree with Jason, JSTL is just one more step in the wrong direction from Sun. I dropped JSP quite some time ago and haven't looked back since.
Interestingly enough, I'm a big fan of Cocoon and the amazing job it does at abstracting away the UI from the content format. What I have begun doing recently is using a combination of custom 'generators' - which are a cocoon concept which simply generate XML for a request, and JSTL JSPs. I use JSTL and JSPs to generate XML/HTML messes that simply can't be managed with a clean content DTD for XML exclusively (i.e. pages with forms and with control links). These pages also have the advantage of being able to harness the dynamic control of JSPs very minimally, such as re-filling form fields, and producing iterations of links.
Before I get some nasty comments, let me say I did and do use XSP when I can, but, JSTL currently produces MUCH cleaner code than most XSP pages of the same flavor. If XSP supported EL, I would use XSP in a heartbeat (hint hint :) ).
The Core tags for JSTL are really useful to help produce dynamic results for pages. The EL allows for very clean, very decoupled traversal of request/session/page attributes - which are the only things any JSP page I write relies on.
Again, however, this isn't support for JSP alone, it's simply a different way to use JSP to produce a favorable, clean result. This allows me to still rely on Cocoon to manage presentation of my site.
