When we are editing web pages in our favourite IDE we expect that it will provide code completion support for all tags and their attributes we use. It is true for plain HTML pages as well as for JSPs and of course XHTMLs. How does code completion works? Very simple: we need to include tag library in page template and that’s it! IDE should analyze this tag library and use tag metadata to provide code completion for page author automatically. Of course tag library should contain all neccessary information for tags, their attributes, functions, etc.

When we create tag library for JSP everything is straightforward: tag library schema support all this information. So we simply create something like that: >> more…

This blog entry opens a series of short articles describing my studying of facelets and attempts to apply it in our platform.

Problem using JSF with JSPs.

First of all, why does our platform need facelets? Currently we are using JSPs with custom JSF tags inside so what’s the problem with combining JSF and JSP? There are lots of good articles related to this topic, so I won’t be repeating their authors. I’ll just briefly sum up main idea.

  • JSP’s goal is to produce static and dynamic content based on HTML/scriptlet mixture; technically speaking JSP produces a servlet. JSP page is processed in one pass from top to bottom, with JSP action elements processed in the order in which they appear in the page.
  • >> more…