Mark Roth recently asked for feedback on the Faces 1.2 and JSP 2.1 specs (via a chat mid-work day, unfortunately).
My response is this:
Mark,
I’m probably not going to be able to make it to the chat, but I did want to raise a one issue about the new JSP spec: I’m worried that it is becoming too married to JSF. It already tied itself too tightly to JSTL by stealing the “${}” syntax, and now I hear it might also take “#{}”. I strongly encourage any future JSP spec to allow for the tag author — not just the page creator (JSP editor) or web deployer (web.xml editor) — to be able to specify if they want their tags to have attributes parsed for ${} or #{}.
As a developer for WebWork, it disturbs me to see keywords suddenly unavailable for JSP tags. We had to settle on %{} because ${} was taken out of our control. Fortunately, we could work around this. If #{} is used in a similar manner, the problems will be much bigger. OGNL uses #{} to represent maps and using this syntax would really hurt WebWork and Tapestry as they both use OGNL.
As an aside, I’d like to see JSP and JSF specs encourage more feedback from communities other than Struts. The Tapestry, Spring, and WebWork communities have a lot to offer and I haven’t seen too much reaching out to them (or at least to me — but maybe that’s my fault).
on Dec 7th, 2004 at 1:23 pm
I asked the following question as part of the chat:
Is there any chance that web frameworks (like WebWork) could override the default settings for the EL? So ${myForm} can look in areas other than page/request/session/application scope – i.e. WebWorks’s ValueStack?
It looks like this is going to be a part of JSP 2.1 – from Mark Roth:
JSP 2.1 is not only concerned about supporting Faces. We also want to support other frameworks. the new unified EL 2.1 API supports the concept of a pluggable VariableResolver (similar to the one that Faces has) which allows you to plug in your own logic for how variables like ${myForm} are resolved. So yes, this will be supported.
on Dec 7th, 2004 at 2:52 pm
Matt,
That’s fantastic to hear!