development

I was looking for an API or (preferably) custom tag library to handle pagination and sorting of lists in JSP, when I came across the display tag library, and I have to admit that I’m very impressed. This tag library is surprisingly easy and intuitive to use, while at the same time being extremely powerful, flexible, and configurable. It supports rendering tables based on a list of elements that can be supplied as a Collection, Enumeration, array, any object that has an iterator() method, etc....

I still have not had much of a chance to play with Laszlo, but IBM has released a very promising looking Integrated Development Environment for Laszlo in form of an Eclipse plugin (what else) on their alphaWorks site. I’ll definitely have to give this a try.

SUN has recently created a new Portlet Community website. It looks like it contains some interesting articles and links.

In the last 4 months or so, I have made several posts on Eclipse, which I had started to use at my previous job. Overall, my experience with Eclipse up to now had been fairly positive, with the exception of some minor quirks. Unfortunately, this has changed significantly in the last two weeks, at my new job. At my previous job, our applications were built on top of J2EE, but we did not use JSP. Instead, our Struts actions generated XML output which was then rendered into HTML using XSLT templates. Therefore, I never even realized that Eclipse does not support JSP out of the box. It does not even provide syntax highlighting! ...

This is a follow-up to my previous posting on several Eclipse shortcomings, mostly regarding JSP support. As I was confused by the relationship between the official M1 release of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project and the various initial contributions, I did a little more research on this. It turns out that quite a few people on the Eclipse newsgroups had the same question… The initial contributions (IBM and Lomboz) are now obsolete and will be replaced by the WTP....