Check out the datagrid library at http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/sandbox/doc/datagrid-doc/intro.html
If all you are looking for is pagination, sorting and ordering from the database this is a good fit. It does not have all the bells and whistles displaytag has, but is a simple and clean implementation.
The biggest issue I have with the stock displaytag is, you have to stick the whole query result somewhere (generally in the users session) to do pagination. A very bad idea in my opinion.
It's not a bad idea, it's a tradeoff: if you want native DB pagination (e.g., limit/offset in PostgreSQL, TOP xx in SQL Server, etc.) you either have to couple your UI components directly to the database, or you have to handle pagination at each and every layer in a multi-tier design (Struts Actions, business logic/session beans, DAOs/entity home interfaces, etc.) Neither choice is particularly appealing for the common case.
My feeling is that, if you can't afford to pull all the results into memory at once, pagination probably is not the right UI design anyway. How meaningful is it to allow the user to jump to page 87 of 439? You should look at pagination strictly as a UI construct, to optimize *client* side performance rather than server-side (i.e., to avoid scrolling and downloading long HTML over a possibly slow dialup link). Then, in exceptional cases, you can always break abstraction and couple your UI directly to the DB (with JSTL sql tags, for instance) for server-side performance tuning when you really need it.
-- Bill -- Bill Schneider Chief Architect
Vecna Technologies, Inc. 5004 Lehigh Road, Suite B College Park, MD 20740 [EMAIL PROTECTED] t: 301-864-7594 f: 301-699-3180
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