Programming Jakarta Struts

Chapter 14. Using Tiles

Up to this point, not much has been said about how to organize and assemble the content and layout of JSP pages for a Struts application. In many ways, that is outside the scope of the topic of Struts. Many excellent books are available that provide strategies for organizing web content and the layout of pages.

In the Storefront application, we have used two different approaches to assembling web pages. The first approach, sometimes referred to as a straight JSP-based approach, is probably the most familiar to web designers. The JSP pages contain presentation logic along with HTML layout tags; there’s no separation of the two. This approach is typically used for smaller, less complicated web applications.

The second approach uses the JSP include directive. It’s used by developers for larger web applications, or after they realize how repetitive the first approach can be. If you have spent much time maintaining web applications, you know how frustrating it can be to update a site’s look and feel. Using the JSP include directive allows for more reuse, which reduces the total development and maintenance costs.

A third approach, which is introduced in this chapter, describes a far better way to reduce the amount of redundant code a web application contains and, at the same time, allows you to separate the content from the layout better than the first two approaches.

Understanding Templates

Traditional GUI toolkits such as VisualWorks Smalltalk or Java Swing ...