Experience of using Struts and custom tag libraries to divide...

[Jeff Bannister <Je...@bull.co.uk>]

Hi,

I am currently development a web based application. The look & feel aspects
of the application are to be written by a third party company, and the Java
work is to be done in house. I have the following key goals...

1) JSPs written by thrid party company should not be modified in house
after
they are delivered i.e. They must be fully functional Struts JSPs, using
Struts custom tags etc
2) The third party company should be shielded from as much of the MVC
complexity and Java stuff as possible, and thier skills are really HTML.
3) The third party company must be able to view the resulting HTML from the
Struts JSP's, i.e. They must be able to run and view the JSPs they
generate.

The problems I face it that in order to create JSP's for Struts that are
fully functional and runnable the JavaBeans, and Struts classes must exist.
For example I want the third party company to use the bean:message tag to
cater for Internationalisation but the documents imply that I must create
and setup a servlet for use this feature.

Can Struts JSP's be called directly in order to just view the resulting
HTML, or will I have to create servlet, and beans etc ?

What's the easiest way of dividing the Web Tier work between web smiths and
the Java developers ?

Comments ?

Jeff.	

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Ultradev CTLX question

["Frederick N. Brier" <fb...@multideck.com>]

If you are in Dreamweaver Ultradev LiveData mode and make a change, then 
Ultradev tries to upload the JSP and directly invoke it on the server.  But 
an ActionForm does not exist, so you will end up with null reference 
exceptions trying to look up the Bean in the request attributes.  What you 
really want to do is have Ultradev invoke your Action class which then gets 
the data and creates your ActionForm.  Am I missing something here?  Is 
there a way to tell Ultradev about (and to use) the Action's forward name 
in the struts-config.xml file?  Thank you.


Frederick N. Brier
Sr. Software Engineer
Multideck Corporation

Re: Experience of using Struts and custom tag libraries to divide...

["Craig R. McClanahan" <cr...@apache.org>]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Jeff Bannister wrote:

> Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 12:36:19 +0100
> From: Jeff Bannister <Je...@bull.co.uk>
> Reply-To: struts-user@jakarta.apache.org
> To: struts-user@jakarta.apache.org
> Subject: Experience of using Struts and custom tag libraries to divide...
>
> Hi,
>
> I am currently development a web based application. The look & feel aspects
> of the application are to be written by a third party company, and the Java
> work is to be done in house. I have the following key goals...
>
> 1) JSPs written by thrid party company should not be modified in house
> after
> they are delivered i.e. They must be fully functional Struts JSPs, using
> Struts custom tags etc
> 2) The third party company should be shielded from as much of the MVC
> complexity and Java stuff as possible, and thier skills are really HTML.
> 3) The third party company must be able to view the resulting HTML from the
> Struts JSP's, i.e. They must be able to run and view the JSPs they
> generate.
>
> The problems I face it that in order to create JSP's for Struts that are
> fully functional and runnable the JavaBeans, and Struts classes must exist.
> For example I want the third party company to use the bean:message tag to
> cater for Internationalisation but the documents imply that I must create
> and setup a servlet for use this feature.
>
> Can Struts JSP's be called directly in order to just view the resulting
> HTML, or will I have to create servlet, and beans etc ?
>
> What's the easiest way of dividing the Web Tier work between web smiths and
> the Java developers ?
>

One strategy that seems feasible is to create "mock up" beans of the types
that will be used to communicate your model tier data to the presentation
tier.  Then, you can write a fairly simple servlet that puts the right
example beans into the right scopes, and then forwards to the JSP page
being developed.

No matter what, your page developers are really going to need to see the
JSP pages in the context of a real servlet container in order to see the
complete visual appearance.  There are some tools that are starting to
make that easier (such as Macromedia Ultradev using the CTLX extension
found on the Jakarta Taglibs site <http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs>).

> Comments ?
>
> Jeff.
>

Craig