I have been reading this thread with alternating feelings of amusement and
alarm. I'd like to add a few thoughts of my own.
Carlos Alonso wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> First of all, I must say I do not have a lot of experience working
> with jsp. From a "newbie" point of view, I think that model 1 is easier
> to understand and use than model 2.
>
Like any broadly useful technology, JSP is going to have users and developers
with a wide range of background and skills. In my case, I plan to build very
large scale, internationalized (i.e. multilingual), complex business
applications. I don't have a problem with a technology that is easy for a
newbie to learn, but I get concerned when people suggest that features
critically important to my needs (i.e. the Model 2 approach) should be
"de-emphasized" or "removed".
>
> >> (Jason said:)
> >>1. Model 2 is poorly explained in the spec. This in itself is a
> serious problem.
>
> The whole spec is quite poor in details and specially model 2 it is just
> introduced without a serious explanation (that it really deserves).
>
It is important to understand who the intended audience for a specification
(and a reference implementation, for that matter) is. The purpose of the
specification is to describe to *implementors* of the technology what it should
do, not to *users* of the technology how to design and code their apps. That
is the domain of Application Development Guides, tutorials, and so on. JSP is
a little too young to have much in the way of this kind of documentation -- but
the spec is only slightly too sparse in details for the intended audience.
>
> About new 0.92 tags, at first sight some seem to me needless (eg.
> <DISPLAY ... vs <% out.print...) but now i think they could be useful.
> If you use a HTML editor like HotMP, you can add (to its dictionary) new
> tags and their corresponding fields and they are checked like any other
> HTML tag. You will also have an attribute inspector to let you enter its
> parameters values. In HTML editor, no syntax checking is performed on <%
> out.print... but will warn you if <DISPLAY ... tag is mispelled. As
> HTML (so jsp) pages are normally changed by people who are not java
> programmers there is fewer risk of mistakes.
>
> Just to end, I think that it is necessary to keep jsp as simple as
> possible. Model 1 is a good choice and easy way to start with jsp (at
> least for me) Model 2 need a better documentation that explains it
> deeply.
>
Model 2 definitely needs better documentation, but IMHO it shouldn't be in the
spec -- it should be in white papers describing the entire model 2 application
design. There is just such a white paper on IBM's web site (I believe it's
www.software.ibm.com) in the E-Commerce section, with a really good overview of
how web application development technologies (including JSP and servlets) fit
together.
Craig McClanahan
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