JSP Components

[Rey Francois <fr...@capco.com>]

In the context of building reusable JSP components, I have been confronted
with the following limitation that both the Struts templating and the
Components from Cedric Dumoulin currently have.

In a word, this limitation is actually due to the fact that none of them
provide a way to perform an action specific to the included JSP. For
example, an application home page may be composed of a body that actually
corresponds to another page in the web application. In this case, the body
is already modeled with a mapping and an action that performs the necessary
logic to retrieve the dynamic content. When servicing the home page, one
would logically like to reuse that action in order to avoid the duplication
of its logic in the action servicing the home page.

One way to do this would be to directly call the action to reuse within the
perform() of the action servicing the home page. However this is not very
flexible because it requires manual intervention.

My short research in past postings actually seems to indicate that this
problem has been mentioned before under various forms. A proposal for a
portal framework was discussed before, and such framework would require such
feature. In one instance the Jetspeed framework was considered for
integration with Struts. In another case one talked about allowing the
ActionServlet to do both forwards and includes.

My questions then are:
- has anybody else been confronted to this limitation, and if so, did you
avoid the problem (for example by using frames) or did you find a solution? 
- would such a feature be considered for inclusion in either Struts or the
Components framework from Cedric Dumoulin?
- anybody having further thoughts on this issue?

Thanks for your feedback on this topic.

François Rey
Financial WebSuite
The Capital Markets Company
http://www.capco.com/


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