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Main | Next day (Mar 22, 2004) »

Sunday Mar 21, 2004

Another JSTL quick ref

Comments[0] by Dave in Links
via java.blogs

Defending ugly old JSP.

Comments[6] by Dave in Java

Russell Beattie complains about the ugliness of JSP, even with the improvements of JSP 2.0. I have to agree. JSP is ugly. JSP also does very poorly in the separate-logic-from-presentation department, scoring an entanglement index of five - and JSTL does not help at all. JSP is butt ugly, but in JSP's defense:

  • It is possible for JSP source code to be valid XHTML. Russell could have done this in his mock-up example by setting a variable and then using the ${var} syntax instead of using "an embedded x:out tag within the href attribute". In theory, by validating your JSP source code as XML and by pre-compiling the JSP at build-time you can weed out a lot of potential errors.

  • Other popular web template languages are just as bad. Velocity, FreeMarker, and Tapestry's template language all have entanglement indexes of five as well.

  • The option of embedding Java code in JSP makes JSP very powerful. Like C++, JSP gives you enough fire-power to blow your entire leg off with one pull of the trigger.

  • Compiling down to Java byte code makes JSP very fast.

  • JSP is an accepted Java standard, it's built-in, it's well understood, and it's easy to find experienced JSP developers.

That last point seems important to me. Perhaps it is not justified and I'm just a Sun lemming, but I'm a little wary of Java web frameworks that attempt to completely side-step JSP.

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