I’m working on a small MVC “framework” (it’s really very small) in Scala. I’d like to be able to write my view files as Scala code so I can get lots of help from the compiler. Pre-compiling is great, but what I really want is a way to have the servlet container automatically compile certain files (my view files) on request so I don’t have to shut down Jetty and compile all my source files at once, then start it up again just to see small changes to my HTML.
I do this a lot with .ascx files in .NET (the file will contain just one scriptlet tag with a bunch of C# code inside which writes out markup using an XmlWriter) and I love this workflow. You just make changes and then refresh your browser, but it’s still getting compiled!
I don’t have a lot of experience with Java, but it seems possible to do this with JSP as well. I’m wondering if this sort of thing is possible in Scala.
I have looked into building this myself (see more info here: http://www.nabble.com/Compiler-API-td12050645.html) but I would rather use something else if it’s out there.
If you want something thats kinda like JSP/ASP/Erb but using Scala code you might want to take a look at Scalate.
Scalate is a Scala based template engine which allows you to use powerful Scala expressions instead of the limited JSP/JSF/JSTL EL expression language – while being completely statically typed so that templates are checked at edit/compile time for errors – and templates are reloaded on the fly as they are edited.
For JSP/ASP style of templates then try the Ssp templates in Scalate which are very JSP-like.
If you are mostly generating HTML/XML markup I’d also recommend giving the Scaml templates in Scalate a try – they are Scala versions of HAML which lead to really DRY templates