When working with web-designers in a Spring-MVC and JSP environment, are there any tools or helpful patterns
to reduce the pain of going back and forth from HTML
to JSP and back?
Project requirements dictate that views will change often, and it can be difficult
to make changes efficiently because of the amount of Java
code that leaks into the view layer. Ideally
I'd
like to remove almost all Java
code from the view, but it does not seem
like this works with the Spring/JSP philosophy where often the way
to remove Java
code is
to replace that
code with tag libraries, which will still have a similar problem.
To provide a little clarity
to my question
I'm going
to include some existing
code (inherited by me)
to show the kinds of problems
I'm likely
to face when change the look of our views:
<%-- Begin looping through results --%>
<%
List memberList = memberSearchResults.getResults();
for(int
i = start - 1;
i < memberList.size() &&
i < end; i++) {
Profile profile = (Profile)memberList.get(i);
long profileId = profile.getProfileId();
String nickname = profile.getNickname();
String description = profile.getDescription();
Image image = profile.getAvatarImage();
String avatarImageSrc = null;
int avatarImageWidthNum = 0;
int avatarImageHeightNum = 0;
if(null != image) {
avatarImageSrc = image.getSrc();
avatarImageWidthNum = image.getWidth();
avatarImageHeightNum = image.getHeight();
}
String bgColor =
i % 2 == 1 ? "background-color:#FFF" : "";
%>
<div style="float:left;clear:both;padding:5px 0 5px 5px;cursor:pointer;<%= bgColor %>" onclick='window.location="profile.sp?profileId=<%= profileId %>"'>
<div style="float:right;clear:right;padding-left:10px;width:515px;font-size:10px;color:#7e7e7e">
<h6><%= nickname %></h6>
<%= description %>
</div>
<img style="float:left;clear:left;" alt="Avatar Image" src="<%= null != avatarImageSrc && avatarImageSrc.trim().length() > 0 ? avatarImageSrc : "images/defaultUserImage.png" %>"
<%= avatarImageWidthNum < avatarImageHeightNum ? "height='59'" : "width='92'" %> />
</div>
<%
} // End loop
%>
Now, ignoring some of the
code smells there, it's obvious that if someone wants
to change the look of that DIV it would be neccesary
to re-place all the Java/JSP
code into the new HTML given (the designers don't work in JSP files, they have their own HTML versions of the website). Which is tedious, and prone
to errors.
