JSP tricks to make templating easier?

user_81557 0
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At work I've been tasked with turning a bunch of HTML files into a simple JSP project. It's really all static, no serverside logic to program. I should mention I'm completely new to Java. JSP files seem to make it easy to work with common includes and variables, much like PHP, but I'd like to know a simple way to get something like template inheritance (Django style) or at least be able to have a base.jsp file containing the header and the footer, so I can insert content later.

Ben Lings seems to offer some hope in his answer here: JSP template inheritance Can someone explain how to achieve this?

Given that I don't have much time I think dynamic routing is a little much, so I'm happy to just to have URLs map directly onto .jsp files, but I'm open to suggestion.

Thanks.

edit: I don't want to use any external libraries, because it would increase the learning curve for myself and others who work on the project, and the company I work for has been contracted to do this.

Another edit: I'm not sure if JSP tags will be useful because my content doesn't really have any template variables. What I need is a way to be able to do this:

base.html:

<html><body>
{ content.body }
</body></html>

somepage.html

<wrapper:base.html>
<h1>Welcome</h1>
</wrapper>

with the output being:

<html><body>
<h1>Welcome</h1>
</body></html>

I think this would give me enough versatility to do everything I need. It could be achieved with includes but then I would need a top and a bottom include for each wrapper, which is kind of messy.

templates tags inheritance jsp java
7 Answers
user_108246970

Add dependecies for use <%@tag description="User Page template" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.5</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet.jsp</groupId>
        <artifactId>jsp-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.2</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet.jsp.jstl</groupId>
        <artifactId>javax.servlet.jsp.jstl-api</artifactId>
        <version>1.2.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>taglibs</groupId>
        <artifactId>standard</artifactId>
        <version>1.1.2</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>
user_112814790

I know this answer is coming years after the fact and there is already a great JSP answer by Will Hartung, but there is Facelets, they are even mentioned in the answers from the linked question in the original question.

Facelets SO tag description

Facelets is an XML-based view technology for the JavaServer Faces framework. Designed specifically for JSF, Facelets is intended to be a simpler and more powerful alternative to JSP-based views. Initially a separate project, the technology was standardized as part of JSF 2.0 and Java-EE 6 and has deprecated JSP. Almost all JSF 2.0 targeted component libraries do not support JSP anymore, but only Facelets.

Sadly the best plain tutorial description I found was on Wikipedia and not a tutorial site. In fact the section describing templates even does along the lines of what the original question was asking for.

Due to the fact that Java-EE 6 has deprecated JSP I would recommend going with Facelets despite the fact that it looks like there might be more required for little to no gain over JSP.

user_68914710
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