Alexandre, If you're looking for a JSF "aware" template technology, I recommend you look at facelets (https://facelets.dev.java.net).
Regards, David -----Original Message----- From: Alexandre Poitras [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 11:17 PM To: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: Re: [shale] Design questions I kind of agree with you Gary. I just love Tiles powerful features and I would like to use it in my JSF application (but I would take a deep look at Tapestry way of doing it to see if it is truly necessary). Anyway, I started to have concerns after watching the JavaOne 2005 presentation "Extreme Reuse in JavaServer Faces, TS-7853" (wich was very interesting by the way). There seems to be a lot of non-obvious concerns when using non-JSF aware technologies for the layout of a JSF view. I know that Shale provides an integration ViewHandler for Tiles wich allow him to resolve ".pages" urls and eliminates the need for stupid jsp wrappers but I think it resolves only part of the problem. Here's a small summary of the main issues for those who don't have time to watch the presentation. First, even if it's not such a huge concern but still have to be taken in account when designing the application, navigation rules are relative to the top viewid and not the tile itself. It can be a bit confusing but I guess you can find your way around it. Second, you can't use some more "advanced" Tiles functionnalities like importAttributes (see the presentation). Again you are sticking to a basic usage, I still think Tiles can be a valid solution. But the main problem come from the fact that Tiles is for the moment not a solution specific to JSF technology and provides no adapters for this framework. Therefore, a tile is sadly not a JSF UI component. It's mean that JSF Beans can't see your application tiles. You can say goodbye to the use of the binding attribute and so managing some of your UI components programmaticaly is impossible. This is a huge limitation in my opinion. Maybe Shale already solves those issues but from what I have read on the Javadoc page, it doesn't seem to. I think people should be aware of those issues to make a discern choice. Just my two cents. I'll be glad to hear any nice solutions to those problems if someone has any ideas. *By the way, the Rolodex use case seems to be broken for the moment except for the jsp example. Both of the Html views and the Xml view output <span class="@class"> around every element. For example, the first line is shown like this <span ...><html></span> (IE is able to render the page but not Firefox of course :)). On 11/22/05, Gary VanMatre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Hi > > > > So how would you implement composition, with inheritance, using Clay > instead of > > Tiles?. > I'm a big fan of Tiles and think that Clay and Tiles have their own > niches. I see tiles as a tool for assembling page fragments in a reusable > way. Clay is at a more granular level. It's focus is on assembling a page of > reusable widgets. > > > There are many ways to use Clay but I'll give the following example of > inheritance and composition. > > > <component jsfid="baseInputText" extends="inputText"> > <attributes> > <!-- Convention mapping "class" attribute to "styleClass" property --> > <set name="styleClass" value="@class"/> > > > </attributes> > <symbols> > <set name="class" value="generic" /> > </symbols> > </component> > > > > > <component jsfid="panel" extends="panelGrid"> > > > <element jsfid="baseInputText" renderid="0" > > <attributes> > <set name="value" value="[EMAIL PROTECTED]"/> > </attributes> > <symbols> > <set name="class" value="blue" /> > </symbols> > </element> > > > <element jsfid="baseInputText" renderid="1" > > <attributes> > <set name="value" value="[EMAIL PROTECTED]"/> > </attributes> > <symbols> > <set name="class" value="green" /> > </symbols> > </element> > </component> > > > Elements form composition but also add inheritance similar to a java inner > class. The new symbol replacement is sort of a tiles like feature where you > can customize by overriding a symbol value. > PS: I'm on vacation this week and have limited Internet access. > > > > > Hermod > > > > Gary > -- Alexandre Poitras Québec, Canada --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
