,ch14.9433  Page 439  Monday, February 14, 2005  12:55 PM

Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

Tiles and Other Presentation

Approaches

14.0 Introduction

Struts is primarily intended to provide the controller for web applications. Some

developers immediately associate Struts with the Struts JSP tags, but any Struts

enthusiast will tell you that the Struts controller framework and API, not the tags,

comprise the heart of the framework. You can limit, augment, and even replace your

use of the Struts view rendering features and still gain many of the advantages

afforded by Struts.

The first half of this chapter focuses on Tiles. This framework, distributed and inte 

grated with Struts, provides a robust approach for reusing pages and page layouts

across your application. If you've never used Tiles, you'll find recipes to get you

started along with some more advanced uses of Tiles. The second half of this chap 

ter takes a step back and shows you how to use new ways of generating HTML

within the context of a Struts application.

The topics in this chapter, particularly the latter half, are broader in scope than most

of the recipes in this book. Entire books have been written about some of these tech 

nologies, such as Java ServerFaces and XSLT, and it would be impossible to cover

them completely in a single chapter, let alone a single recipe. The recipes here will

help you get started using these technologies and will give you some insight and

understanding on the technology and its application.

14.1 Reusing a Common Page Layout with Tiles

Problem

You want to define a common layout for your application and use that layout

throughout your application without having to cut and paste HTML everywhere.

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