Question

My apologies if this is a stupid question, however I can’t find any information about this.

I would like to use a JSP tag (not play ‘tags’) in my application views – specifically, the Joda Time JSP tags for formatting purposes.

I can’t work out how to call these tags – in JSP I just had to import the taglib and off I went.

  <%@taglib prefix="joda" uri="http://www.joda.org/joda/time/tags" %>

Have I missed something simple – how do I do this in Play view definitions? At the moment my taglib calls are rendered as HTML. I understand that Play’s view stuff is based on Groovy’s – I have tried finding the relevant information there too but haven’t been successful.

Thanks.

Edit For what it’s worth I’m starting to suspect that I’m very much misunderstanding the situation here – am I correct in my assumption that the Play templating engine has nothing to do with JSP and is an alternative rather than an extension?

Answer 1

Indeed, you cannot use JSP tags. The Play framework uses (by default, although there are alternative modules that can replace the rendering engine) the Groovy templating engine to create the views. It is these views that are responsible for both the templates and for the majority of tags you will create.

There are also the concepts of FastTags, which may be the easiest way for you to expose the JodaTime functionality that you find in the JSP tag library. A good example of how to build FastTags can be found here…

Can someone explain how to use FastTags

However, if all you are trying to do is to neatly format dates, then you should take a look at the JavaExtensions for date formatting. http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.2.1/javaextensions#date. To format dates is really simple, your code should be as simple as the following (assuming your date is passed into your view as mydate.

${mydate.format('dd MMMM yyyy hh:mm:ss')}

You can even create your own JavaExtensions if the ones built-in to Play don’t offer everything you need.

Finally, It is important to understand that Play is not Java EE. Play has its own stack, its own set of rules and its own set of technologies. It can be difficult at first to separate yourself from the Java EE tools, but you almost certainly find that the Play approach saves you time and effort.