Comments on: JSP + Struts = one bad day

By: eater

eater — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:59:58 +0000

JPS evil – right

By: Stratos

Stratos — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 18:51:36 +0000

Struts is so bad its a geeks holiday. I have never
seen anything so bad as STRUTS and JSP pages.

I agree crucify struts. Its unbelievably bad.

exactly!

By: bluesockets

bluesockets — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:25:10 +0000

i have to say JSP isnt easy unless you have a full depth of understanding of how the tags work, and coming from a java perspective, i dont understand half of what the tags are supposed to do so i throw them out the window and prefer to use plain old java. at least then my ide catches silly syntax errors or mal formed statements. HTML is a sloppy language with loose enforement on correct syntax and JSP tries to hide behind the guise of HTML’s ease of use, yet the important distinction is you cant turn HTML looseness into java strict syntax. its like trying to cast an Integer into an int. everything has its purpose, but inherently all xsp server side scripting languages fail to the point where if the developer cant pick up the slack, theres not much that can be done other than googling out an acceptable solution to the hypothetical problem.

By: Sam Newman

Sam Newman — Thu, 20 May 2004 09:50:02 +0000

For some things JSP can be fine – I’ve used JSP since the first version was released. However it is fundamentally unsited to some tasks due to its reliance on XML as a format. Iteration is ugly but not that bad. Logic branching however is really nasty and shows up just how bad XML is as a syntax for programming languages.

I’m the first to admit that there might not be a perfect solution, however JSP has some fundamental issues which make me believe it might not be it.

By: Pawn

Pawn — Wed, 19 May 2004 23:25:07 +0000

Not everyone hates JSP. I find it quite easy and simple to work with.

...but then again I was feed asp when I was a child.

By: Jon Tirsen

Jon Tirsen — Wed, 19 May 2004 07:46:14 +0000

I think your JSP implementation is equiped with an artificial intelligence fuzzy logic evaluator. It parsed your statement “I hate JSP” and made the decision that regardless of what the boolean expression evaluates to this has to hold true; everyone hates JSP, right?

Is this feature in the JSP spec or is it a vendor-specific extension?

By: Sam Newman

Sam Newman — Tue, 18 May 2004 15:06:44 +0000

My server restriction is that I’m coding for a websphere version which cannot use the JSTL (ealier version of the servlet API) – not much I can do about that. For development purposes I’m using Tomcat (which uses Jasper internally of course) which reports no error.

As for this being a simple user error, the fact is that JSP as a technology makes such erros very easy to make and not always easy to track down. Simple HTML is actually very ‘loose’ unless you are writing proper XHTML and are serving it up as XML as opposed to a text mime type – missing tags get ignored by many browsers. Serving it up as XML forces the browser to make sure its valid XML – in my case Jasper isn’t even checking my JSP parts of the page are XML.

I must admit that this may of been fixed in a later version (as I stated I have to work with an older version) however at the end of the day JSP is an awful technology to work with as time and again we get put in situations where we are using it for tasks it is completely unsuited to – we are trying to use XML as a programming/scripting language, and it is fundamentally unsuited to this task.

By: Jason Barker

Jason Barker — Tue, 18 May 2004 14:45:58 +0000

Sorry, typo
If you have an error like that, even simple HTML won�t work.

By: Jason Barker

Jason Barker — Tue, 18 May 2004 14:43:05 +0000

Sam, – I use Eclipse with Lomboz plugin, it picks up the non-well formed tag. I fail to see how such error could pass the coder’s attention, specially the ones who use IDEs. – What do you mean by server restriction? – I precompile with weblogic and it gives me compilation error when the servlet (from the JSP) is compiled. What do you use? (out of curiousity). – I encourage you to post it to struts mailing list, who knows you might be enlightened (or not :)). Even though I agree logic tag should no longer be used.

Andreas,
Are you restricted to using Jasper? If you think it’s crap, why use that crap?

Anyway, it just baffles me that such a simple user error drag people to blame/complain about 1) struts, 2) JSP, 3) jasper.
If you have a simple HTML error like that, even simple HTML won’t work.

By: Andreas Mecky

Andreas Mecky — Tue, 18 May 2004 13:04:01 +0000

I have to agree 100%. JSP are evil but struts is even worse. These struts tags must be written by idiots.
Wherever I can I will use velocity because you CANNOT
put code in your templates.
Oh, and writing your own JSP tags can be painfull. Mostly because of this damn Jasper. Another jakarta
project that is crap. If you have an error in your
custom tags then you are doomed since Jasper just
swallows the exception.