I’ve started working on a example app as well as a testing framework.  I’m jumping back and forth on some other projects, so dev will probably be slow.  My only issue is whether to piggy back htmlunit/httpunit or roll a lot of it myself.

I’ve been really digging github.  I moved source control there a few weeks ago and have loved it.  Check it out.

http://github.com/arisbartee/jsp-afterburner/tree/master

The example application I envisioned for JSP Afterburner is a bust. I had an ideal but couldn’t really see what it looked like and did.  So I’ll go with an address book application.The Address book will be simple. I’ll use a multiple object model instead of a simple object.  This way I hope to nothing except build a profile for a single person.  I’m ignoring groups and companies for now. I’ll focus on the way makes a person. 

I’ve lost my warm and fuzzy for Maven. To rephrase, I’ve lost confidence in Maven. Not the architecture, the repository and project layouts are sound. I’m done with pom.xml.

I’ve been wondering why there’s not a popular java library for outputting text into an HTML page. Other language have methods/functions/procedures to escape html tags or sanitize tags found in strings. But Not Java. It’s another case of the small stuff that makes life easier being ignored.

I love web development. I’ve enjoyed doing it with java. However, the popular web frameworks for java complicate what should be simple process. Frameworks like tapestry abandoned JSP for a different methodology and other frameworks like struts and JSF bastardize JSP. I’m proposing jsp afterburner.

HOW TO DEVELOP WITH IT

1. create a class that implements the afterburner.jsp.JSP class
2. use protective fields for object you want exposed to the JSP.
3. create a method (public foo()) that populates the protected fields.
4. create a jsp with the same name as the method (foo.jsp) that extends the class above.
5. use the protected methods in the jsp.

HOW TO CONFIGURE

JSP Afterburner requires an entry in the applications web.xml file.

afterburner.jsp.AfterburnerContextListener

HOW IT WORKS

URLs are important to afterburner. Each request that makes use of the framework must explicitly go to the desired JSP file. For example, show.jsp must be the request resource. We use the name of the JSP file to tell us the action method to execute. This convention relieves you from configuring action handlers for all your URLs. This convention allows for multiple JSP files to extend the same class.

1. Create a JSP file. We’ll call the JSP file show.jsp.
2. Create a custom class which extend afterburner.jsp.JSP.
3. We’ll call your custom class custom.Pojo.java.
4. Add to custom.Pojo a method. Name the method show (public void show(){}.
5. Show.jsp extends your custom class.
6. When the url http://HOSTNAME:PORT/show.jsp is requested Afterburner executes the method custom.Pojo.show().

For request that do not map to a rendered jsp, include with the request parameters a value for “exe”. The “exe” value is the method to execute. The method can redirect to another page or continue rendering the default page.