[thelist] How do you build dynamic pages?

Tom Dell'Aringa pixelmech at yahoo.com
Mon May 24 11:07:38 CDT 2004


Hi folks,

Some of you know I'm a big standards proponent, so I build my front
ends apporpriately. Most things I build at my place of employment end
up as JSPs. I've worked at various places over the past 10 years and
seen various ways to build pages on the fly. I'm wondering how you
all do it and what you think of the process they are using here. I'm
thinking its not so great - but I'm not and engineer/architect - I'm
a front end guy.

We want our pages to be optimized as best we can in all ways -
including search engines.

So here it is - please tell me what you think and what you would do
differently, etc.

1. I build the templates for the pages using web standards. A typical
template will break up into a header, content piece, maybe a sidebar
and a footer. Let's use that as our example.

2. Currently requests for our pages are routed through IIS to an app
server (WebLogic), which actually handles the requests. I'm told this
is for security reasons and has something to do with our connection
pools being shared. I don't get it. What I do know is that this
necessitates things like:

- our links having an extra directory on them. Like this:
www.mydomain/ExtraDir/pages.jsp - which I hate.
- our home pages are generally ASP pages that are redirected and end
up being www.mydomain.com/homepage.asp - which is not ideal.

3. We build pages with a 'dispatcher.' The engineer sets up a
database and based on the request URI builds the page dynamically
from the database. So lets say I request page.jsp. The dispatcher
would pull globalHeader.html, pageContent.html, pageSidebar.html and
globalFooter.html and build page.jsp.

We even do this where pages are totally static - nothing dynamic at
all on them.

I've worked at places in the past where we have used Jakarta Struts
as well. I'm not sure that was any better or not, but I don't think
anyone here knows Struts. It seemed like a good system, especially
with MVC theory behind it.

My concerns are that this *might* be a bad way to build pages (I
really don't know) and there might be a better/easier way. Also, the
search engine thing. Any comments are welcome and appreciated.

Tom

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