On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, John Yu wrote:
> I'm new to Tomcat/Jasper. I have a question regarding Jasper:
>
> Does Jasper parse a JSP into a DOM-like objects. In other words, does Jasper
> create in-memory parsed tree of the the JSP file?
>
It does not currently do this. Essentially, Jasper today is a bunch of
pattern matchers that have associated code generators that are triggered
when the patterns are recognized.
> I notice from Tomcat 4.0's documentation that there's some plan to upgrade Jasper.
> I'm wondering how that's going and whether the upgrade does anything related
> to the above area I mentioned.
>
In Tomcat 4.0, the majority of the work was to support the new JSP 1.2
features. The fundamental architecture of Jasper is still pretty much
what it was in 3.2.
One of the things I'd like to see happen in the 4.x world (and I'm working
to acquire some development resources for it) would be a fresh start,
looking at JSP page compilation through the eyes of an experienced
compiler writer that can leverage all of the tricks optimizing compilers
have been using for the last 30 years. There are *lots* of opportunities
to generate smaller/faster code, even for the standard JSP 1.2 syntax --
there will be even more opportunities as the JSP Standard Tag Library
matures (for example, the page compiler should be able to recognize the
JSPTL iteration tag and generate standard Java loop handling code, instead
of treating it as a normal custom tag).
> Thanks in advance.
> --
> John Yu Scioworks Technologies
> e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] w: +(65) 873 5989
> w: http://www.scioworks.com m: +(65) 9782 9610
>
Craig
