My first developer article

[DaBeeeenster]

My mate works at Sitepoint (as a technical book editor) and managed to twist my arm into writing a developer guide for the JSTL.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1243

If anyone has any comments or ideas about how it could be better I'd be interested to know. Also, if you want to learn about the Standard Tag Library in Java you can read it for that reason too

And yes, that is me in the hat

[Shad]

Nice hat

[killgORE]

Nice hat indeed....
Also the article is nice and short. Quite clear, and has a helpful smattering of wit. WHY have you not written more tutorials !

One thing I have to pick you up on though... Why would developers that know java quite well - but don't want to mess around with servlets (as they suck) - want to use this new library ? When JSP offers a very comfortable medium for making dynamic webpages quite quickly... I hear your argument about structure to the architecture. But this can be provided by using struts. Clear separation form GUI and backend. And I think provides a very structured manner for using beans.

I think this tag library will definately have its exponents. But why would developers want to learn a whole new ?language?

[killgORE]

Errr. Sorry. Not that I expect you to defend this technology. I just think this issue should be raised in the article.....

[DaBeeeenster]

Thanks for the feedback.

It's not really a whole new language. It's more a way of writing JSP's but without resorting to scriptlets which can get very messy very quickly.

I see the JSTL as something of a halfway house between JSPs and "proper" frameworks like Struts. Writing with JSTLs enforces you to but business logic etc into the Beans, and ensures (not rigorously but to a large degree) that what you are writing in the JSP is presentation layer and nothing else. I agree that it does not seperate the View and the Controller in the same manner as Struts does, but that is not really its purpose.

Once you've learnt four or five tags, and the basis for the EL (which will take a competent JSP programmer about 30 minutes) there's not much more to it.

I agree that there could be more about where the JSTL sits in terms of JSP/Struts/Servlets etc. but the aim of the article was to be more practical than philosophical.

[killgORE]

k...

Got pulled over once when I was tripping on acid. I'll match that with any drunk story you ever heard....

(COULD NOT STOP MYSELF)

[DaBeeeenster]

Actually, there was a time when I was in Heaven in London (about 4 AM I seem to recall) where things went particularly mushy peas