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The Example JSP Pages

This chapter describes the tasks involved in using and defining tags. The chapter illustrates the tasks with excerpts from the JSP version of the Duke's Bookstore application discussed in The Example JSP Pages rewritten to take advantage of two tag libraries: Struts and tutorial-template. The third section in the chapter, Examples, describes two tags in detail: the iterate tag from Struts and the set of tags in the tutorial-template tag library.

The Struts tag library provides a framework for building internationalized Web applications that implement the Model-View-Controller design pattern. Struts includes a comprehensive set of utility custom tags for handling:

• HTML forms
• Templates
• JavaBeans components
• Logic processing

The Duke's Bookstore application uses tags from the Struts bean and logic sublibraries.

The tutorial-template tag library defines a set of tags for creating an application template. The template is a JSP page with placeholders for the parts that need to change with each screen. Each of these placeholders is referred to as a parameter of the template. For example, a simple template could include a title parameter for the top of the generated screen and a body parameter to refer to a JSP page for the custom content of the screen. The template is created with a set of nested tags--definition, screen, and parameter--that are used to build a table of screen definitions for Duke's Bookstore and with an insert tag to insert parameters from the table into the screen.

Figure 15-1 shows the flow of a request through the following Duke's Bookstore Web components:

• template.jsp, which determines the structure of each screen. It uses the insert tag to compose a screen from subcomponents.
• screendefinitions.jsp, which defines the subcomponents used by each screen. All screens have the same banner, but different title and body content (specified by the JSP Pages column in Table 13-1).
• Dispatcher, a servlet, which processes requests and forwards to template.jsp.

Figure 15-1 Request Flow Through Duke's Bookstore Components

The source code for the Duke's Bookstore application is located in the docs/tutorial/examples/web/bookstore3 directory created when you unzip the tutorial bundle (see Running the Examples). To build, deploy, and run the example:

1. Download Struts version 1.0 from

   http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-struts/
   release/v1.0/
    
   

2. Unpack Struts and copy struts-bean.tld, struts-logic.tld, and struts.jar from jakarta-struts-1.0/lib to <JWSDP_HOME>/docs/tutorial/examples/web/bookstore3.
3. In a terminal window, go to <JWSDP_HOME>/docs/tutorial/examples/bookstore3.
4. Run ant build. The build target will spawn any necessary compilations and copy files to the <JWSDP_HOME>/docs/tutorial/examples/web/bookstore3/build directory.
5. Make sure Tomcat is started.
6. Run ant install. The install target notifies Tomcat that the new context is available.
7. Start the PointBase database server and populate the database if you have not done so already (see Accessing Databases from Web Applications).
8. Open the bookstore URL http://localhost:8080/bookstore3/enter.

See Common Problems and Their Solutions and Troubleshooting for help with diagnosing common problems.

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This tutorial contains information on the 1.0 version of the Java Web Services Developer Pack.

All of the material in The Java Web Services Tutorial is copyright-protected and may not be published in other works without express written permission from Sun Microsystems.