I've spent a couple of days mucking about with the new JSP, and I have to
say, I come down hard in the camp of those who are unhappy. There are some
great things in 1.0 -- for instance, the retirement of SETONCREATE and
SETFROMREQUEST -- but the absence of INCLUDEIF, EXCLUDEIF and LOOP are
killing me. Let me give a quick & easy example.
In the application I'm working on, UI writers often have the need to
traverse a data set to make a table. In 0.92, this was accomplished in a
really lovely way:
<USEBEAN name="results" type="ResultsBean">
...
<TABLE>
<LOOP property="results:rows" propertyelement="row">
<TR>
<LOOP property="row:cells" propertyelement="cell">
<TD><%= cell %></TD>
</LOOP>
</TR>
</LOOP>
</TABLE>
This was great for the following reason: it was really easy for
non-programmers to both understand and write (I know this from direct
experience, incidentally). This is, for me & my customers, terrifically
important.
You can imagine what things look like now, but let me show you, if only for
the cathartic effect I'm hoping it will have on me:
<TABLE>
<% RowBean[] rows = results.getRows();
for (int i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) { %>
<TR>
<% CellBean[] cells = rows[i].getCells();
for (int j = 0; j < cells.length; j++) { %>
<TD><%= cells[j] %></TD>
<% } %>
</TR>
<% } %>
</TABLE>
To me, this is heinous. It's ugly & error-prone to boot. To my customers, it
may very well be incomprehensible (can you tell I'm unhappy? ;). I'm looking
into solutions (if anybody on the list has one, please say so!) such as
maybe creating some formatting beans (or even using IBM's JSP alphaBeans),
but there's no way they will match the high degree of intuitiveness (for
HTML coders) that the 0.92 version allows.
Am I missing something here?
chris
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