Java Enterprise Best Practices

Use JSP Custom Tags or the JSTL for Locale-Specific Data Presentation

No doubt, if you’ve used the JSP technology in the past, or if you’ve heard or read discussions on the topic, you can run into trouble by embedding too much Java code in your JSP pages. A reusable and component-based approach to removing Java code from your JSP pages is to use custom tags. As you broaden your scope from the user’s language preference, an application will need to present data to the user. Certain data elements such as text, numbers, dates, and times will need to be presented in the most locale-specific manner possible.

A number of tag libraries are available for presenting data in a locale-specific way. The JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL)^[24] falls under Java Specification Request (JSR) 52 and provides you with a common set of tags that you would expect to see when developing J2EE-based applications that use the JSP technology. A number of tags that handle internationalization formatting fall under the JSTL. Chapters 8 and 9 of the JSTL specification discuss all the relevant details of the tags specific to internationalization and localization.

A more formal discussion of JSP custom tags (and developing these tags) is outside the scope of this chapter. However, we would like to cover an example of using the JSTL. Example 8-1 demonstrates the use of the JSTL using Tomcat 4.0.3 running under Java 2 SDK 1.4.0 under Windows 95. You can download the JSTL Reference Implementation and Tomcat ...