Mailing-List: contact taglibs-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org; run by ezmlm
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Reply-To: taglibs-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:36:53 -0500
To: taglibs-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: taglib contributions
Message-ID: <20010430093653.B4330@epesh.com>
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From: joeo@cupid.suninternet.com (Joseph B. Ottinger)

Due to the gentle urgings of James Strachan, I've decided I'm willing to
apportion a few of my taglibs to jakarta, if you guys want them. The taglibs
in question are the rewritetags, logtags, and filetags.

Rewrite is a simple url-correction tag. For example, <rewrite:a
href="/mypage.html">My Page</rewrite:a) in a web application in the "myapp"
context has the href rewritten to be "/myapp/mypage.html". This is simple,
and it's possible Jakarta already has an example of this. This should be
improved; some bright soul might see the benefit in having a tag that only
rewrites the URL and not the whole tag. (This semi-bright soul does, but
this tag was written as a quick hack that turned out to be largely useful
despite its hackiness.)

Logtags is a taglib that maps nearly directly on top of Log4J, with
<log:error /> and so forth. The only difficulty is that it maps nearly
directly on top of Log4J, which - while it's a great logging library - can
hardly be seen as the ONLY logging library.

Filetags is a mechanism for reading files (not resources!) for quoting
purposes; where example code is seen on my site for JSP pages, filetags is
doing the work of reading the source files from the disk. If you're using a
.WAR instead of a directory tree, this doesn't work so well.

All slightly flawed, IMHO, which is why I've never considered them as
prominently as the formtags, transformtags, or webcompass, but certainly
moderately useful, and improvable. If you'd like them, let me know -- note
that this isn't the first time I've offered them, so you can hardly hurt my
feelings by ignoring them yet again. :)


-- 
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Joseph B. Ottinger                           joeo@epesh.com
http://epesh.com/                             IT Consultant