Another approach might be to ditch the JSPs in favour of another approach to rendering your view. One alternative that springs to mind is using Velocity. I havent used it myself but I do know that there are tools to help you use it in a struts application. http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/index.html Im not sure however that this is quite what you are looking for, as it stills seems to me require use of some kind of scripting on the page to deal with dynamic content, which of course the page designers would need to learn.
or for something completely different... There is another alternative, but there isnt much existing support for using it with struts (ie: you will need to do a lot more work), and that is to make direct use of DOM manipulation. I am using such a system myself in my current application, and it allows for a nice seperation of layout and content. (At the price of heavier memory usage and slower response times compared to using the JSP tags - whether this is a significant problem rather depends on the application you are creating. (Ie: do you expect 100 or 1000 users an hour...)) My own approach is homegrown and application specific (with all the 'fun' that entails) however it is inspired very strongly by the open source XMLC (which supports html as well as xhtml) library. The basic idea with XMLC, is that a page designer can use their favorite html editing tool to make the layout, XMLC will give you a means of getting this page as a DOM (it actually generates java source code that will build the dom at runtime!) and the programmer uses Java (proper Java, where it belongs - in classes not on a layout page!) to insert the dynamic bits. (And can also modify the page in a more flexible way than a custom taglib ever could). The way the designer indicates where the dynamic content is to go is usually by means of the id attribute that all the html elements support. (The designer and programmer agree on the values to use for the various id's beforehand). You can take a look at the following link for more info on XMLC: http://xmlc.enhydra.org/ The Barracuda framework, (another mvc framework for webapps) makes use of XMLC for its view rendering. If you want to use XMLC in struts however, you will have quite some work to do, as among other things you will need to duplicate of lot of the struts taglib functionality using the XMLC DOM based methodology (which means digging around in the struts tag source code to see how they do their thing) as of course XMLC itself knows nothing about ActionForms etc... -----Original Message----- From: Hajratwala, Nayan (N.) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, September 13, 2002 04:40 To: 'Struts Users Mailing List' Subject: RE: content management ideas? Unfortunately, I don't believe this is a very practical approach. A content editor may inadvertantly make a change to a tag without even noticing it (search & replace, fat-finger, etc). Then after they upload their change to the server and spend a few hours trying to figure out why it is displaying an error, they call you, the developer to debug the problem. You then compare the previous version (you are using source control, right?) with the modified version to see what the problem is... yada-yada. We use an approach of having a template which contains all of our "base" html .. header, footer, etc. The content editors can create whatever they want (we encourage valid XHTML, but usually don't get anything for our efforts), and upload it to the test servers. Our framework then pulls the content into the template via a custom tag (using java.io.*). Hope this helps... Happy to provide more details if you need. --- - Nayan Hajratwala - Chikli Consulting LLC - http://www.chikli.com -----Original Message----- From: Kenny Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 4:01 PM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: RE: content management ideas? Hi Bryan, ..but that's what JSP is designed to be... html developer friendly. Once you create the page with all of the struts tags, they should just be able to code the html and content around the JSP. I know it's not exactly what you were expecting, but my suggestion would be to let them modify the JSP, just instruct them that they are not supposed to touch the JSP tags. Kenny Smith JournalScape.com -----Original Message----- From: Bryan Field-Elliot [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 1:09 PM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: content management ideas? I was wondering how people handle frequent content updates with Struts/JSP? At my company, I'm building a site for which much of the "static" content (including things like the CSS stylesheet) will probably undergo frequent revision. I'd like to open it up for easier access, such as via FrontPage, so that I (the programmer) am not in the middle of such changes. But the site is very dynamic, with almost all page fetches resulting in a database query and dynamic content being built. So the site needs to be JSP-based, and I don't want the aforementioned "Frontpagers" modifying the raw JSP pages. Opinions appreciated on how this compromise can best be reached, Bryan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
