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| JavaServer Pages: Panacea or Quagmire | Recently, the word "wireless" has caused a near panic among server companies, investors, and computer journalists |
| by Richard Katz, Java Skyline | Please also see: Note at the bottom of this article and Learn JSP - Ed |
| Mar 8, 2000 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| As designers wade through oceans of requests to take advantage of powerful Java server and EJB capabilities, does JSP help or is it just another swamp? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Of course, you only discover the alligators when you're trying to drain the swamp.
Hopefully, the collection of articles on JavaServerPages on Java Skyline: News (March ) provide
you with some insight as to where the alligators are before you get in knee deep. My own favorite alligators -
ones which may not have been previously mentioned are these: Form follows function. The first principle of design is quite well known: "Form follows function." Function means purpose. The purpose of JavaServer Pages (JSP) generally, is to make it easy for you to develop a user interface to a Java server system. But in getting there, "JSP" did not quite follow function - or purpose. Instead it followed something else called "ASP." ASP, Active Server Pages, was a Microsoft IIS invention and quite possibly the most confusing and convoluted part of IIS at that. If the goal of JSP is to behave like ASP, then it does that just fine. If you didn't like ASP, you might not like JSP much better. But that's not the main point. Mixing Metaphors. The point is TCP is a very well defined interface that incorporates a client metaphor and a server metaphor. You can build an application independently on either side of TCP. It's ability to communicate with something on the other side is undiminished. You can change the client without affecting the server and visa versa. JSP tries to bridges across TCP. But this bridge has certain pot holes. Like suppose the client is something other than a standard browser - such as an Excel spreadsheet, or a WinInet program, or more importantly a wireless device. What to do About Wireless. WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and WML (Webserver/Wireless Markup Language) are very new arrivals on the Internet Server scene. But recently, the word "Wireless" has created near panic among large server companies (as well as investors and computer journalists) as they try to keep up with what's going on. In the two weeks following "Palm" three major server companies IBM, Sun Alliance, and BEA all announced support for wireless. I will be more than surprised if WAP/WML and JSP can coexist in any meaningful way. Building Pages. Finally, what JSP and WAP both lack is a healthy set of visual (WYSIWYG) editing tools that don't mess up the mind of your presentation designer. DrumBeat 2000 JSP Version of course runs on Windows -- but not on the Mac and many designers like to use the Mac. Other programs such as Adobe GoLive! provide only token abilities to (hopefully) at least not destroy the server-side tags you put into a JSP file. What's needed are standard meanings for tags that designers can understand - and something that can actually edit the server-side tags as well as the visual page. Luc Saint-Elie has a short article on an open source JSP tag library project from Source Forge that could help in this regard. Ultimately JSP wasn't a panacea. It was a placebo. JSP's real purpose I think was to make Java servlets able to do something that IIS could do and keep us satisfied that we had as many web design capabilities for Java as the what industry as a whole could fashion. In that regard, it's successful and getting better. And the articles from Java-Pro and JavaWorld show that there are some organized ways to implement JSP-based solutions. But there are tools that you may eventually like better such as XMLC and WebMacro as Jason Hunter points out. And there are now tools that even extend WebMacro such Petr Toman's new Action Servlet also mentioned on the news page. In the mean time, I'm about to delve into DrumBeat. This could get interesting. I'll keep you posted. Rich Katz ED Java Skyline: News Reference Material Editors note: Since this article was orgininally written, I have also written the LearnJSP section. LearnJSP forms an important coda to this article. JSP was orginally designed as a replacement for ASP. However, JSP has matured as a platform along with Servlets. JSP and servlets now provide a the developer a reasonable ability to do design work based on MVC and patterns. Together JSP and Servlets have brought serious OO design to the Web and form a highly flexible and portable interoperability layer. |
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| Richard is the editor-in-chief, news editor, and regular writer for Java Skyline. He also maintains several pages for the Cetus Links, and has previoulsly written articles for PC World, and Byte. |
