On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Matthew L Daniel wrote:
> > ( BTW, my interest is more in the jsp->java convertor area, I would be
> > interested to try a more customizable generator that would use XSL
> > templates, but that depends on a modularization and refactoring that would
>
> I remember back in the "old days" when the JSP spec actually contained a
> representation of JSP syntax as XML tags (<jsp:expression> and whatnot), but
> Tomcat didn't support it because (as I recall) Sun deprecated it. I'm with
> Costin, I think that would be/was just super-cool.
The XML syntax is part of JSP1.2, but the JSP parser can easily generate
SAX events from a "normal" JSP that match the 1.2 XML representation.
Just to make clear - this is more of an experimental/cool/maybe project,
and a refactoring that would allow other generator modules to be plugged
in would make possible to do this kind of experiments while sharing the
same infrastructure and without hurting jasper's stability ( i.e. I'm not
proposing to replace the current stable code with some cool stuff - just
to make things more modular so experiments in code generation can happen).
I think Mel's original proposal had this right - developing the new
JspServlet interface along with the old one, and allowing the user to use
either ( until the new one is clearly ready and we can deprecate the old
one ). Same should happen in the generator, compiler and for all other
components of jasper.
And the good news is that the refactoring shouldn't be very difficult -
the most important thing is to agree on the components, move the code in
new packages and then try to simplify the interfaces. After that we can
test and make sure we still have the good jasper, and start playing with
new JspServlet, parsers, generators, manglers, etc.
Costin
