Raible Designs

Saturday December 20, 2003

Struts Menu 2.1 Released! This release is primarily a bug-fixing release, but I also added a couple of enhancements. The first is the variable substitution now uses JSTL, which means two things.

• You must use a JSP 1.2 container and include the standard tag library in your project for this to work.
• You can now use "dot" notation in your variables. For example, ${user.name} will now work.

Other enhancements include added support for standalone menus in the Explandable List Menu (no items, just a <Menu>) and highlighting of the last menu clicked.

List of Changes (from http://struts-menu.sourceforge.net/changes-report.html):

• Changed dynamic variable feature to use JSTL's ExpressionEvaluator. To substitute request parameters, you must use ${param.paramName}, rather than just ${paramName}.
• Fixed UseMenuDisplayerTag to allow config in menu-config.xml to override the default (as documented).
• Fixed DisplayMenuTag to continue rendering menu items when Action or Forward lookups fail.
• Added support for highlighting the last menu selected in the Expandable Menu.
• Added support for standalone links/menus (no children) to Expandable Menu.
• Added struts-menu.tld to the binary distribution.

A complete CVS changelog can be found at: http://struts-menu.sourceforge.net/changelog-report.html.

Demo: http://raibledesigns.com/struts-menu
Download: http://tinyurl.com/2aq6k

I realize the JSTL stuff could backfire if users are stuck on an old container. Hopefully, you can simply continue using 2.0 if that's your situation.

JSF 1.0 - Proposed Final Draft Spec and Beta Reference Implementation From Craig McClanahan on the struts-dev mailing list:

I'm pleased to announce that the Proposed Final Draft version of the JavaServer Faces 1.0 Specification, and a corresponding Beta release of the Reference Implementation, is now available at:

http://java.sun.com/j2ee/javaserverfaces/download.html

Please send any feedback and comments strictly about JavaServer Faces to jsr-127-comments@jcp.org.

I'm also finishing up an update to the Struts-Faces Integration Library, and will be making it available (via nightly builds) very soon. Feel free to ask any questions about how to use Struts and JavaServer Faces here on the STRUTS-USER list.

Sweet! It's almost time to try JSF in a webapp. I'd love to offer a web layer for AppFuse in JSF. But then again, I'd like to offer WW2 and Tapestry options too. I just need to figure out how to give the developer that option when building. The main problem is it'd probably be a pain in the ass to maintain all 4 implementations. But then again, that's what unit tests are for!

In other news, a nice patch has been proposed for the DisplayTag that would give it JSTL's EL support. Posted in Java at Dec 20 2003, 05:40:02 AM MST 1 Comment