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From: rubys@us.ibm.com
To: tomcat-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Message-ID: <85256883.0042A772.00@d54mta04.raleigh.ibm.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 06:51:46 -0500
Subject: Re: [PROPOSAL] <Servlet> tag
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Danno Ferrin wrote:
> For more exotic translations like PHP, at the top of the page we could
> imply a "<%@ page language='jzope' %>"  and for .cfm files there could
> be a "<%@ taglib uri='...' prefix='cfm' %>" implied and all the parser
> does is treat the cold fusion tags as if they appeard with the prefix
> (of course the taglib would need to be written).  Man, if my employer
> would just let me work on tomcat all day the pluming jhtml and the
> jsp-xml would all be there by june.  Big clinets can be so particular
> sometimes.

Err, zope is something different.  You must be thinking about Zend.

If I didn't have an employer, things might be much further along too....

Even so, there is much to be done before this can work.  The language must
be able to deal with Java objects.  Second, the language must be able to be
called by Java.  The JSP implementation must know how to deal with page
languages other than Java.  This last one is quite complicated - to do it
right, one must be able to deal with statement fragments.

For PHP, I'm done with the first step.  The second step is largely done (I
have PHP wrappered by a servlet - which still allows the PHP source to be
read from a file.  I need to enhance this to enable the script to be read
from a string).  For the latter, I have a hack of the Jasper code which
doesn't handle sentence fragments, and isn't 100% in compliance with the
current levels of the JSP spec...  (I keep meaning to clean it up and share
it, but I never seem to quite get there...)  This is where much work needs
to be done...

Other languages, like JACL, JavaScript, JPython, LotusScript, Perl,
NetRexx, TCL, VBScript are also in various stages of development.  These
are easier because they don't have their own idea of sessions, cookies, and
the like.

- Sam Ruby