JSP's Evolution
There's another interesting discussion taking place over on the struts-dev list again. Man, I'm glad I subscribed (again) to this list last week! It started out as a discussion of JSP vs. Velocity and Craig (McClanahan) provided an interesting evolution of JSP (and comparison to Velocity).
Velocity:
========
(Note -- it's assumed that the Customer collection has been stored in the
VelocityContext by some preceding business logic.)
\#foreach $result in $results {
<tr>
<td>$result.ID</td>
<td>$result.Name</td>
</tr>
}
JSP 1.1 (with Scriptlets):
=========================
<%
Customer custs = ...;
for (int i=0; i < custs.length; i++) {
%>
<tr>
<td><%= custs[i].getId() %></td>
<td><%= custs[i].getName() %></td>
</tr>
<%
}
%>
JSP 1.1 (with custom tags):
==========================
(Note -- it is assumed here and in the following examples that the
Customer collection has been stored by some preceding business logic.)
<logic:iterate id="cust" name="custs">
<tr>
<td><jsp:getProperty name="cust" property="id"/></td>
<td><jsp:getProperty name="cust" property="name"/></td>
</tr>
</logic:iterate>
JSP 1.2 + JSTL 1.0:
==================
<c:forEach var="cust" items="${custs}">
<tr>
<td><c:out value="${cust.id}"/></td>
<td><c:out value="${cust.name}"/></td>
</tr>
</c:forEach>
JSP 2.0 + JSTL 1.0:
==================
<c:forEach var="cust" items="${custs}">
<tr>
<td>${cust.id}</td>
<td>${cust.name}</td>
</tr>
</c:forEach>
</pre>
I can't wait for JSP 2.0 - it's going to make everything so much easier. Once again, we have exciting times for the Java world. With the power of JSP 2.0 and XDoclet, deadlines should be a non-issue. Now we just have to figure out the best way to use them, and the fastest way to pump out a Struts project. Wouldn't it be awesome if you you could add a new column to a table, build your project using Ant and XDoclet and whalla, all your classes are updated! That would be cool - and I think it's possible. Now I just have to figure out how - and fast!