This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Marc Logemann. Original Post: VTL reincarnation in JSP 2.0 Feed Title: Marc's Java Blog Feed URL: http://www.logemann.org/day/index_java.xml Feed Description: Java related topics for all major areas. So you will see J2ME, J2SE and J2EE issues here. Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Marc Logemann Latest Posts From Marc's Java Blog

You are in an Java MVC environment and you are looking at a template with the following line:

<input name="firstName" value="${customer.firstName}">

What do you think you are dealing with? A year ago people had clearly pointed out to work with a Velocity Template, but nowadays, you can also use JSP 2.0 with this syntax. What does it mean? Finally JSP get serious about templating.
And it means that ASF did a good job in JSR152, i assume that Geir was involved.

Sitting in a large project these days containing all design errors one can possibly make in a J2EE project, i thought about moving away from pages like:

<% Foo foo = new Foo();%>
<% if(foo.isfoo()) { %>
<h1>Blub</h1>
<% } %>

And turn to JSTL and EL, but then i noticed that i cant easily reference variables i (or better the original programmer) created inside scriplets with EL. So refactoring the if with JSTL will not work until i put the foo in some context with some extra statement. So the transition of scriplets based JSP will not be easy at all and will be a tough challenge.

So all you J2EE "designers" and wannabe designers out there, if you do a large scale J2EE project, use a MVC Framework and if you use JSP 2.0 for templating, give this statement a whirl:

<jsp-config>
    <jsp-property-group>
      <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
      <scripting-invalid>true</scripting-invalid>
    </jsp-property-group>
  </jsp-config>