Hi Guys,
We've always used a very simple Command Pattern J2EE framework. But, I'm
look at the various MVC frameworks out there, to see what might be the
easiest to use, while being flexible enough to handle any need. Seeing
that JAX-RS seems to allow virtually any type of HTTP handling, and it's
very simple to use, I'm leaning towards using it's MVC framework.
I'd like to add an MVC feature to Jersey, in a way that doesn't affect the
current way that Jersey MVC is implemented; obviously we don't want to
break existing systems. i.e. backwards compatible.
PROBLEM
Including JSP navigation, header, foot, and generally any *page* layout
includes into every page is a lot of hassle. If you ever do a rebranding,
you may (and frequently do) need to change those around. If on the other
hand, ALL layout is done in a single JSP file, and that file does the
including of all content related pages, there's only one single place to
change the layout.
POSSIBLE SOLUTION
I'd like to have the concept of @MasterTemplate(name = "index.jsp"), where
if that is present on the class, all @Template references get transformed
into automatically setting the page field of the service, and
"${model.page}" references refer to it. It would be assumed that any
method using @Template would then need to return the service class, and
that service class would need to implement a MasterTemplate interface
perhaps, so that they all have the String getPage() method.
Then, the master template file has includes like the following. As you can
see, the caveat is that you do need to change this file every time you add
content. But that's a very minor issue, considering the benefits. I've
gone through rebrands doing it this way, a few times now. It use to be
soooo painful, but now it's easy peasy lemon squeezy. If writing an
application that needs to be extendable by clients, then creating a
"content.jsp" that the client can overwrite to have their content pages
included like we're doing below, is an easy way to make it so that they
don't need to modify it.
<c:when test="${model.page == '/WEB-INF/jsp/test.jsp'}">
<jsp:include page="/WEB-INF/jsp/test.jsp"/>
</c:when>
<c:when test="${model.page == '/WEB-INF/jsp/testpath.jsp'}">
<jsp:include page="/WEB-INF/jsp/testpath.jsp"/>
</c:when>
<c:when test="${model.page == '/WEB-INF/jsp/com/example/ApiKeys/main.jsp'}">
<jsp:include page="/WEB-INF/jsp/com/example/ApiKeys/main.jsp"/>
</c:when>
Thoughts?
p.s.
If this is a feature that Jersey developers don't want to include, is there
a way I can implement such a thing without it being integrated into Jersey
code?