Re: Include JSP page in freemarker page

Hi,

On Oct 17, 2008, at 3:53 PM, Attila Szegedi wrote:

>
> On Oct 17, 2008, at 10:10 PM, Rhett Sutphin wrote:
>
>>> Guys, we still should add that servlet_include stuff to the
>>> FreemarkerServlet, after all we give access out-of-the-box to the
>>> Servlet scopes too, so, you see, it meant to be a dirty but instant
>>> replace-your-JSPs solution, which it isn't without Servlet include,
>>> IMO.
>>
>> A similar useful feature would be support for JSP 2.0 tagfiles (i.e.,
>> taglibs that are written using JSP code instead of java code).
>>
>> I looked at adding support for this to freemarker a few months ago,
>> but with no luck.  I'm hoping I just missed something and it would be
>> as easy as you suggest adding servlet_include would be.
>
> *sigh* As the guy who wrote the current FreeMarker JSP taglib support,
> I have to tell you that no, it isn't so easy, unfortunately, because
> we'd need to write a full parser for JSP pages. I don't see this
> happening - it'd require FreeMarker to ship a JSP parser in its JAR
> file. A "good enough" solution might be to leverage an existing JSP
> compiler implementation if one is found in the classpath... If we'd
> just bind to whatever is Tomcat's implementation, we'd probably serve
> a fair chunk of the user base :-) (Provided we can get at it from a
> webapp; Tomcat is notorious for hiding implementation classes from
> webapps, not that I disagree with that architecturally).

Yeah, that's basically where I stopped, too.  I tried to figure out  
how I could get JspC to let me dynamically compile the tagfiles and  
then invoke them using freemarker's existing compiled taglib support  
but I didn't have any luck.

> Of course, If you're running with FreeMarker, FM's namespaced macro
> libraries are superior solution in all regards. That's one of things
> that tick me off BTW, but I don't want to veer into a rant (too much)
> here -- here we are, with a solution that's technologically and even
> from a programming language theory point of view much cleaner than JSP
> ever was or ever will be, and people keep using this half-baked,
> poorly conceived thrown-together set of hacks collectively named JSP.
>
> So, if you can, I'd advise you to just forget about tagfiles and
> transition to FM macro libraries. If you're stuck with third-party JSP
> libraries implemented as tagfiles though, then yeah, that's another
> matter, and tough luck for now... But I really don't see how can we
> support that without access to JSP parsing functionality, and even
> then...
>
> Attila.

I agree -- I'd prefer to stop using tagfiles (and JSP in general), but  
I have this huge-ish existing application that uses them all over the  
place and I can't avoid it.

Thanks,
Rhett

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