Form Simplication Tags for JSP 1.2 and Servlet 2.3

[j2eeguru]

Are there any plans to create HTML tags similar to the Struts HTML tags to be used in servlet 2.3 containers? In case the spring developers have not noticed, there are not too many commercial application servers that support the latest J2EE 1.4 specification. My company recently upgraded from Weblogic 6.1 to Weblogic 8.1 which is compliant with J2EE 1.3 and thus servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2. I have proposed that we switched from Struts to Spring MVC for our next project but I am facing heavy resistance from Struts loyalists who favor using custom tags for form fields as opposed to using Spring's flexible but verbose style bind tags to do the same thing.

Does the spring team think that the web tier is vastly becoming a servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 world and therefore will stop focusing on servlet 2.3?

[urubatan]

I solved this problem, switching to velocity in the view layer :D

[j2eeguru]

Switching to velocity is not an option for our team. So, my question on providing form simplification tags for servlet 2.3/JSP 1.2 containers still remains.
In my own project, I would use velocity, which is simpler than JSP, which renders faster and which is more MVC-friendly. However, our project will have to integrate with third party tools which provide JSP custom tags and therefore, we want to use a consistent view technology (JSP). Besides, we are implicitly required to stick to standard J2EE as possible except for the use of EJB which is optional.

[klr8]

Spring has made an explicit decision not to generate any HTML from their custom tags, so I don't think a spring:form tag or something like that is on the horizon.

Ofcourse it would be pretty easy to create these kinds of tags yourself.

Erwin