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20030122 Wednesday January 22, 2003

Display Tag Library - donate it! If you need a slick JSP Tag Library for sorting and paging data, the display tag library is a great library to use. However, it's got issues - just like any piece of software. I've fixed a couple on my own, but it definitely needs some work - and integration with Struts (i.e. for getting messages, or referencing forwards) would be awesome.

The problem is that Ed Hill doesn't seem to be working on it anymore - and there hasn't been a release since May 2002! Since I do have the source it wouldn't be hard to create a project at SourceForge for it. It would be great to get some input from Ed though. Last year, I think he even did a presenation on JSP Taglibs at Java One! I know there's lots of Struts developers that use the <display> tag - I wonder if they'd be interested. I think I'll send this to the mailing list (and cc Ed) and see what happens. Posted in Java at Jan 22 2003, 10:01:36 PM MST 1 Comment

Commons Lang: StringUtils My new favorite method is the equals method on Commons Lang's StringUtils class. It takes the check for null out of your logic and can help you create cleaner code. Before using it you might have to write something like this: 

if (request.getParameter("checkbox") != null 
    && (request.getParameter("checkbox").equals("true"))) {

With StringUtils.equals(String, String), you get a little less coding:

if (StringUtils.equals(request.getParameter("checkbox"), "true")) {

If you're using Struts or some other library that already depends on commons-lang, why wouldn't you use it? Possibly performance reasons, but I doubt it causes much of a hit. Posted in Java at Jan 22 2003, 06:05:51 AM MST 4 Comments