[thelist] How do you build dynamic pages?

raditha dissanayake jabber at raditha.com
Mon May 24 12:10:19 CDT 2004


Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:

>Hi folks,
>  
>
Hi, answering some of your questions only.

>So here it is - please tell me what you think and what you would do
>differently, etc.
>
>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:
>  
>
IMHO java application servers are a waste of money in most cases. I read 
an article somewhere that 80% of the time they end up being lowly old 
servlet containers.

>- 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.
>  
>
/ExtraDir/ is not always needed.

>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.
>  
>
For static pages you are right to question the logic of this approach. 
It would be far less expensive to generate the html once using your 
script and 'export it' to the web server.

>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.
>  
>
MVC sure is a good idea but not sure struts is a good idea though (shoot 
me!). As the PHP afficionados will say PHP is the simplest way of 
building complex web apps. Struts surely would be the most complex way 
of building simple web apps.  Certainly hand coded jsp (or better if you 
can use servlets) will out performs anything that you build using any 
kind of tag lib.

(This is my humble opinion. If you disagree, i will respect that and not 
argue.)

>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.
>
>  
>


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Raditha Dissanayake.
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