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Wednesday April 28, 2004

What should we do with Tiles?

There's some discussions taking place on the Struts Developer Mailing List about what to do with Tiles. Tiles is gaining popularity in frameworks other than Struts - i.e. Spring and JSF. Personally, I don't mind that Tiles is buried deep inside struts.jar b/c it's basically the difference between a 500 KB JAR and a 100 KB JAR - and disc space is cheap! However, an advantage of extracting Tiles from Struts is that it then has the opportunity to become friendlier to other web frameworks. I'd even like to see a Sitemesh-like Filter so you could do Sitemesh stuff with Tiles. Or maybe just bundle Sitemesh with Tiles as a kick-ass templating engine.

So the question is: What should we do with it? Should it become a Jakarta Commons project or a Jakarta Project? Or even a java.net project? Tiles Users - we need your feedback!

Posted in Java at Apr 28 2004, 11:35:00 AM MDT 16 Comments
Comments:

The integration between Tiles and Struts is OK, but not particularly solid. Tiles documentation could use an overhaul. Breaking it out is fine as long as there is 'easy' integration with struts and 'some' backware compatibility.

Posted by Edgar Dollin on April 28, 2004 at 01:29 PM MDT #

I want commons-tiles out of struts regards

Posted by Haris Peco on April 28, 2004 at 01:51 PM MDT #

can sitemesh do everything tiles can do?

Posted by Unknown on April 28, 2004 at 01:51 PM MDT #

Yes, plus more...

Posted by Jason Carreira on April 28, 2004 at 02:11 PM MDT #

Yes, take it out of struts. Where it lives in jakarta is moot, but better jakarta than java.net.

Posted by Bill de hÓra on April 28, 2004 at 03:10 PM MDT #

This needs to be on the dev mailing list for struts not on a blog

Posted by Jason Pratt on April 28, 2004 at 05:17 PM MDT #

I agree it's important to discuss on the struts-dev mailing list. <em>However</em>, the advantage of <em>putting some feelers</em> out on my blog is that the other framework (JSF and Spring) users can have an opinion. If it's on the struts-dev list, then it's isolated to Struts users. Of course, any extraction from Struts would not involve a decrease in Struts-compatibility. I'm also suspicious that the Struts committers don't use Tiles - but that's just a hunch.

Posted by Matt Raible on April 28, 2004 at 05:25 PM MDT #

Diskspace may be cheap, but bigger/more jars slow down development within many ide's. As if our ide's weren't slow enough, they need to parse through the libs for code completion and compile issues. I know a project with less jars runs faster in eclipse.

Posted by Matthew Payne on April 28, 2004 at 06:37 PM MDT #

Validator is in commons, but I believe most use is through struts applications - means struts nightly has to depend on non-released commons software and when validator gets released its hard to get it tested properly. Won't the same sort of issue arise with tiles if it is moved to commons? Now struts is a TLP perhaps a compromise would be to keep it under Struts as a separate component - similar to what I understand is an option for the tag library.

Posted by Niall Pemberton on April 28, 2004 at 07:10 PM MDT #

Niall - I agree with you that moving it out of Struts has the same potential hazards that validator has. Now that Spring has support for using Commons Validator - I think it might get a bit more outside-of-struts use. Maybe it's possible to simply JAR up the Tiles classes as a separate JAR? Wouldn't that be the simplest/easiest solution?

Posted by Matt Raible on April 28, 2004 at 07:30 PM MDT #

Just wanted to comment on Matt's "suspicion" about the Struts committers. ;-) I'm one of the Struts committers, and I certainly do use Tiles. On the last big Struts project I worked on, we would have been up the proverbial creek without Tiles, or something like it.

Posted by Martin Cooper on April 28, 2004 at 09:41 PM MDT #

Yes, extract it out of Struts. Struts is a framework, and as such, much like Spring does, should not be so tightly knitted into the various components, however it should allow for interchability with other components. Struts will lose nothing from having Tiles as a commons library. Not even sure why it's a big debate. R

Posted by Robert S. Sfeir on April 29, 2004 at 06:02 AM MDT #

The integration between Tiles and Struts is OK, but not particularly solid. Tiles documentation could use an overhaul. Breaking it out is fine as long as there is 'easy' integration with struts and 'some' backware compatibility.

Posted by Edgar Dollin on April 29, 2004 at 06:27 AM MDT #

This would take more work, but IMO, a better choice would be to loose tiles into struts, i.e. any action could be a tile or a servlet/jsp with the declaration of the 'tiles' in struts-config. This lack of integration hinders use of tiles in my case, i.e. only if there is a serious need for tiles, is it implemented.

Posted by Edgar Dollin on April 29, 2004 at 06:57 AM MDT #

I'd like to see Tiles pulled back out of Struts to help other projects feel like they don't have to "make their own version" of Tiles. While it is bundled with Struts, projects like JSF and Spring will be reluctant to use it (I think?) just because they would have to have Struts bundled in with their stuff (and, hence, have or imply dependencies on it). Tiles is a really useful and well implemented architecture for very common problems people face making UI's (web pages in particular). If it is left in Struts, I feel that stand alone competitors will make their own version and then we'll all have to learn 6 different versions of the same thing (like with is happening with all of these controller frameworks).

Posted by Allen Servedio on April 29, 2004 at 07:34 PM MDT #

There is a separate template taglib in Coldtags suite See http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/template.htm

Posted by Dan Novik on May 02, 2004 at 11:54 PM MDT #

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