I have tried using JSP on several occasions and every time I realise that I hate it, but when I started playing with Google App Engine(GAE) and the GWT I came to a conclustion that I am not a fan of that either.
I first started with GAE and Python and found that
django was quite nice in the way it let you seperate the code and presentation easily, were someone with not python knowladge could easily edit the template.
So I turned to google and types in "JSP alternative", the first one I found was
Freemaker so I downloaded the latest version and set out to complete this
tutorial. There was one small problem the tutorial was a little out of date and try as I might I could not the the
<list>. It turns out the the tutorial is a little old is not for the newest version(2.3.16 at the time of posting) of Freemarker and there have been a few changes with one major change, that being tags such as
<list> and
<if> now have a # before them so they look like
<#list> and
<#if> I made the change and the example worked!
To go from JSP to Freemarker I had to make a few changes. First I added freemarker.jar to
/war/WEB-INF/lib/.
Next I created a template file called index.html and added to the war folder here is the template.
<html>
<body>
<ul>
<#list files as file>
<li>
<a href="/filestorage?name=${file.name}">${file.name}
</a> (${file.mime})
</li>
</#list>
</ul>
<hr />
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="/filestorage" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="1000000" />
Choose a file to upload:
<input name="uploadedfile" type="file"/>
<br/>
<input type="submit" value="Upload File"/>
</form>
</body>
</html>
After that I added a function to the serverlet to set the template values and display the template
/*
* Displays the template
*/
private void DisplayTemplate
(HttpServletResponse resp
) {
//Now loads the data and adds it to a SimpleHash
SimpleHash modelRoot
= new SimpleHash
();
modelRoot.
put("files", FileDAL.
getFilesHash());
try {
resp.
setContentType("text/html");
Configuration cfg
= new Configuration
();
Template tpl
= cfg.
getTemplate("index.html");
tpl.
process(modelRoot, resp.
getWriter());
} catch (Exception e
) {
System.
out.
println(e.
getLocalizedMessage());
}
}
Last of all I replaced
resp.sendRedirect("/index.jsp"); with
DisplayTemplate(resp); and thats it.
The source is available from
github.
