Colin's Journal

Here’s a fairly good description of what’s wrong with JSPs (via Hack the Planet). JSPs are exceedingly popular at the moment as part of the J2EE environment, mainly because they are so well supported and documented. They are also extremely powerful, and so programmers and architects will initially think that they are the best way of doing a web application. The HTML designers usually get no say in the selection of architecture, even for a web based application, and so all of the issues that JSPs have don’t come out.

What’s an alternative? The ideal replacement needs to be valid HTML so that the resulting file can still be edited/viewed in the standard tools of a web designer. It should also have a syntax that’s easy enough to learn that those doing the HTML design can easily incorporate the required elements into the page. The best example I’ve seen of this is TAL. I’ve actually written a new implementation of TAL, that isn’t dependent on Zope (or rather some of the python extensions that come with Zope), for this very weblog. TAL is nice because there is very little logic that can be included in the template, and the syntax of the template is non-intrusive to the HTML (only additional tags are used).

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As you can see if you are reading this post I’ve updated my weblog and main page to a new look. The formatting is basically the same, but the new selection of colours should make reading posts much easier. It also looks much more proffesional (at least to my eye!) than the previous design.

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