Here is my problem:
My Spring MVC website is going to rely a lot on external JavaScripts/CSS/Images. This domain needs to be configurable. Also, I’d like to be able to throw pieces such as my header and footer into JSPs that can be included. When adding an image to a JSP, I need to be able to generate a link to the image using the configurable external static content domain.
My Solution so far:
So far I’m thinking I can use a combination of JSP templates which will load configuration classes which output my configuration values (so that the JSPs can use these configuration values). I guess the only problem I really have with this is that now I require all of my JSPs to import the template and then also import those configuration classes to access the static content URL.
My Question:
Does my solution outlined above make sense? Is it really the best approach? What have people generally done to solve this problem? What other solutions are available to abstracting and reusing JSP components?
Notes:
- I’m using Spring MVC 3… I’m a bit new to Spring and MVC in general
- This isn’t an overly large website…
nor will it be used in a full
production environment.
Spring MVC is excellent on the C part, pretty good on the M, but but a bit of a no-show on the V. It delegates all view responsibilities to other frameworks, usually vanilla JSP/Freemarker/Velocity. This is fine in most cases, since those view frameworks provide plenty mechanisms for assembling composite views. They’re pretty basic, though.
However, sometimes you want something more rigorous, which is where the likes of Tiles or Sitemesh come in. These frameworks specialise in assembling web views from component parts, and are mostly agnostic of the MVC framework that they work with.
Spring MVC will neither help nor hinder your use of these frameworks, and they integrate with each other pretty well (SiteMesh does, anyway, I’m not that familiar with Tiles, but I hear it does the job well).