Java Enterprise Best Practices

Take a Portal-Based Approach to JSP Development

In David’s article on Java, “Designing Internationalized User-Interface Components for Web Applications,”^[26] the use of JSP custom tags for the presentation of localized data in JSP pages was discussed. In that article, the InsertText tag not only pulled a specific item from a resource bundle, but it also handled issues with text direction. In certain locales, text can be written from left to right or right to left, or it can be bidirectional. Arabic and Hebrew are the canonical examples of languages that are bidirectional.^[27]

The example usage of the tag in this article did not elucidate the other looming issue you might be faced with when designing for bidirectional languages. The entire user interface can also be “written” differently. Take Figure 8-5, for example, which shows Microsoft Outlook Express running under a Hebrew version of Windows.

Figure 8-5. Microsoft Outlook Express running under a Hebrew version of Windows

To accommodate such issues in your web-based applications, develop your user interface through a portal approach. In a portal approach, you identify potential areas of content that need to be displayed to a user. From Figure 8-5, you can discern four distinct content areas:

1. Menu bar at the top of the screen containing the various menu options and a button bar

2. Folder list containing the various mail folders for the ...