Is there any way to reduce the verbosity of JSP pages

Question

After three years on a RESTful Java/ExtJS application, I have taken over development of a Java/JSP application.

New to Java Struts, I am finding the use of struts tags in JSP pages to be insanely verbose, e.g.

<input type="button" value='<bean:message key="button.addDoc"/>' />

Of course there are about 1700 message tags in every page, and it would seem that something like $m("button.addDoc") would be quite enough. Is there some way to shorten the bean:message elements to something less noisy, or is this just the Java way?

related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3174373/is-there-and-shorthand-for-fmtmessage-key-key — Bozho, May 12 '11 at 15:58

BalusC · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-12T16:10:54.833

1

or is this just the Java way?

That's just the Struts way. It's a pretty legacy MVC framework. You could consider to look for a different MVC framework which resolves properties by just EL, for example JSF.

E.g.

<h:commandButton value="#{bundle.addDoc}" />

It's only going to be a lot of work with that much pages/tags. Since it's apparently an assignment, I'd just live with it and keep it for the future in mind to deny old Struts based projects.

edited May 12 '11 at 16:10

answered May 12 '11 at 15:36

BalusC

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note that spring doesn't have s short way as well. Check my comment on the question. – Bozho May 12 '11 at 15:57
thanks for the help. It's not an assignment, it's my sole responsibility for a good while. – kevin cline May 12 '11 at 16:07
I think my ultimate plan is to move all the JSPs to to Groovy HtmlBuilder. – kevin cline Jun 02 '11 at 22:28
You can use EL without moving to JSF. – kevin cline Feb 05 '13 at 19:55

Is there any way to reduce the verbosity of JSP pages

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