Monday, February 21, 2011

Grails Taglib : The template composition pattern

Grails leverages Sitemesh, a decorator engine, to support view layouts. Sitemesh layout is restricted to page layout and are not applicable to do template layout. For example a template layout which describes the composition of a table and a toolbar.

The purpose of this taglib is to define a ui composition pattern to leverage template layout.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

JSF2 - Benchmark datatable

In this article I will bench the datatables of 3 JSF2 components frameworks :
  • Icefaces 2
  • Primefaces
  • Richfaces

I will focus on efficiency : page size, ajax request/response size, server load, and not on features.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Grails View as Spring MVC View

Introduction


The reference documentation of Spring 3 contains the following statements:

One of the areas in which Spring excels is in the separation of view technologies from the rest of the MVC framework. For example, deciding to use Velocity or XSLT in place of an existing JSP is primarily a matter of configuration. This chapter covers the major view technologies that work with Spring and touches briefly on how to add new ones.


The supported views are "JSP & JSTL", "Tiles", "Velocity & FreeMarker", "XSLT". Those are the major view technologies that work with Spring. The Spring MVC stack is usually : Spring MVC + JSP/JSTL + Tiles or SiteMesh. All these tools sound outdated, always usefull but outdated. On the other side there are frameworks like JSF, Grails, Play! (not exhaustive list) which come with great views more up to date.

Grails is the most logical choice because it uses Spring MVC internally. The task should be easier. To be honest this choice is not a very hard one because Grails view is elegant.