On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Jayson Falkner wrote: > Overall your opinion seems to be the JSTL tags would just be easier > and accomplish the same thing. I tend to think they are not easier at > all, just a different approach. Do you think it is wise to promote > the use of these tags to new users? Especially when it may result in a > JSTL skillset compared to a sound understanding of what most people > consider the best method of developing JSP/Servlet Web Applications.
In general, JSTL requires that users know less, making its use easier. For instance, users of JSTL tags don't need to understand the lifecycle considerations associated with a JDBC Connection, Statement, or ResultSet; if the applications performs sufficiently well without finer-grained management of such resources, then development is easier with no loss in quality of the code. > > * for any simple application, when its clear that it will not go > > through major extensions; using just JSP pages with action elements > > is probaly very cost-efficive in this case (lower development time). > > Probably? Is it quicker for you or any projects you have helped on? I can certainly say, from my own experience and anecdotal evidence, that prototyped pages (and small applications) can be faster to develop in JSP than in JSP + Java. > > As Shawn, I also see the URL actions as a perfect fit with the View > > in MVC, no matter if you use servlets or not. XML processing can > > About the URL components. The import action seems nice, but not really > practical. Is there a good case where it would be desired to directly > import external content in to a web app? Sure - consider importing a header from another web application. Would you really want Java code to do this, instead of a single <c:import> action element? > If the content needs to be further manipulated it makes sense Java > would be desired to properly do it, so importing some XML, perhaps > from a Web Service, is something that would much better be done by a > Java class. For importing data from a web service, I tend to agree that more abstraction is useful; James Strachan and others like the idea of using XPath to parse responses from web-services, but I'm not fully convinced of the utility of that approach. However, displaying data from an XML document that's retrieved from a database or URL is reasonably within the realm of the presentation tier. What's the advantage of using Java, versus JSTL, to loop over all <customer> elements of a document and print the value of their <orderNumber> children? > Do you think the url tag is more helpful then a custom anchor-like tag? > e.g. <a href="<c:url/>">link text</a> versus > <c:a url="http://...";>link text</a> > The custom anchor-like tag syntax is cleaner, and it would be easy to > code any URL rewriting logic in to the custom tags setter method. But this then ties JSTL to HTML in particular (something we've consistently avoided doing), and it also requires a separate JSTL tag for each HTML element that might contain a URL -- including, at least, <a>, <img>, <iframe>, <frame>, <form>, and <link>. Worse, every potential HTML 4.0 attribute would need to be replicated by the JSTL tag; I believe <img> has about two dozen attributes, for instance. Furthermore, this wouldn't help when sending a URL as part of a block of scripting code (e.g., JavaScript). > What is a good use for the redirect tag? Forwarding to a resource that's not in the web application (and is thus beyond the reach of <jsp:forward>). -- Shawn Bayern "JSTL in Action" http://www.jstlbook.com (coming in July 2002 from Manning Publications) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
