I've experimented and have found one way to templated site with JSP but
there has to be a better way. First, I'll explain what I do at the moment.
Consider a very simplistical sitemap ~
Homepage
+-Company
+-Products
+-Services
+-Feedback
I've created a folder structure to represent this. And the default page in
each folder is index.jsp. Each page (index.jsp) shares the same banner
(Banner.jsp), footer (Footer.jsp) and navigation menu (Menu.jsp) which go in
the Global folder. So, this gives me the following ~
index.jsp (Homepage)
\Company\index.jsp
\Products\index.jsp
\Services\index.jsp
\Feedback\index.jsp
\Global\Banner.jsp
\Menu.jsp
\Footer.jsp
So far, so good. Next, to make it easier to edit the content on each page
and to make it easier to have uniform consistency of pages, EVERY index.jsp
is IDENTICAL ~
index.jsp
---------
<%@ include file="/Global/Banner.jsp" %>
<table>
<tr>
<td><%@ include file="/Global/Menu.jsp" %></td>
<td><%@ include file="body.jsp" %></td>
</tr>
</table>
<%@ include file="/Global/Footer.jsp" %>
Using this, the final file structure is ~
index.jsp (Homepage)
body.jsp
\Company\index.jsp
\body.jsp
\Products\index.jsp
\body.jsp
\Services\index.jsp
\body.jsp
\Feedback\index.jsp
\body.jsp
\Global\Banner.jsp
\Menu.jsp
\Footer.jsp
And you know, this system works for me. To edit any page, all I have to do
it edit the body.jsp which means that I have little risk of messing up the
template.
The problem with this is obviously all those identical index.jsp's !! If I
have to make a change to the layout, then I have to change all of them.
That's obviously BAD but is a simple search/replace because they're all
identical anyway.
I know I can use Velocity within JSP in order to use one template for all
the JSPs but I still end up with literally hundreds of identical index.jsp
pages for a real site with many levels of subdirectories. It'll be easier to
change the template for layout but really whenever I see repetition on the
scale of all those index.jsp's I think something's inefficient.
There has to be a better way of doing this, is there ?
Soefara.
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