I finally got fed up with Tiles and wrote something new. Naymz had a bunch of random exceptions in the logs and almost all of them were caused by Tiles. I started digging and eventually just got mad at the whole situation. WebWork had repackaged tiles and apache was still supporting the Struts tiles. I didn’t want to spend all day fixing WebWork to use the Struts tiles and I also didn’t want to figure out if there were major differences between these two that could be causing the problem. Plus, tiles uses the digester for parsing XML, which seemed to fail at random. This code was quite thick and I knew it could be done in a much lighter weight and concise manner.
So, I threw out a simple XSD for the format and then implemented the parser and tag lib and 7 hours later I had Bluprints 0.1 up and running. This thing is pretty suite. It supports nesting, extensions, parameters, page references, and a bunch of other little cool features. It’s really simple to learn and I’m hoping to write some docs for it this coming week. I’m also hoping that because it is so simple and lightweight that folks start using it and helping to test and develop it. We’ll see about that though. Plus, it has no dependencies except on the J2EE libraries and WebWork, but only if you use WebWork. Lastly, it is running on a live production site already https://www.naymz.com.
Anyways, feel free to check it out over at Source Forge. Here’s the link to the project.
Invert your Mind 