I’ve got a program that currently has a mass of code that I would like to design away. This code takes a number of text files and passes it through an interestingly written interpreter to produce a plain text file report that goes on to other systems. In theory this allows a non-programmer to be able to modify the report without having to understand the inner workings of Java and the interpreter. In practice, any minor change likely necessitates going into the interpreter and tweaking it (and the domain specific language isn’t exactly friendly even to other programmers).
I would love to redesign this code. As a primarily web programmer the first thing that came to mind when thinking of “non-programmer being able to modify the report …” I replaced report with web page and said to myself “ah ha! Jsp.” This would give me a nice What You See Is Almost What You Get approach for people along with taglibs and java scriptlets (as undesirable as the later may be) rather than awkwardly written DSL statements.
While it is possible to use jspc to compile a jsp into java (another part of the application runs ejbs on a jboss server so jspc isn’t too far away), the boilerplate code that it uses tries to hook up the output to the pagecontext from the servletcontext. It would involve tricking the code into thinking it was running inside a web container (not an impossibility, but a kluge) and then removing the headers.
Is there a different templateing approach (or library) for java that could be used to print to a text file? Every one that I’ve looked at so far appears to either be optimized for web or tightly coupled to a particular application server (and designed for web work).
So you need a slim down version of JSP.
See if this one (JSTP) works for you
http://jstp.sourceforge.net/manual.html