Blogging Roller

via java.blogs

Russell Beattie complains about the ugliness of JSP, even with the improvements of JSP 2.0. I have to agree. JSP is ugly. JSP also does very poorly in the separate-logic-from-presentation department, scoring an entanglement index of five - and JSTL does not help at all. JSP is butt ugly, but in JSP's defense:

• It is possible for JSP source code to be valid XHTML. Russell could have done this in his mock-up example by setting a variable and then using the ${var} syntax instead of using "an embedded x:out tag within the href attribute". In theory, by validating your JSP source code as XML and by pre-compiling the JSP at build-time you can weed out a lot of potential errors.
  
  
• Other popular web template languages are just as bad. Velocity, FreeMarker, and Tapestry's template language all have entanglement indexes of five as well.
  
  
• The option of embedding Java code in JSP makes JSP very powerful. Like C++, JSP gives you enough fire-power to blow your entire leg off with one pull of the trigger.
  
  
• Compiling down to Java byte code makes JSP very fast.
  
  
• JSP is an accepted Java standard, it's built-in, it's well understood, and it's easy to find experienced JSP developers.
  
  

That last point seems important to me. Perhaps it is not justified and I'm just a Sun lemming, but I'm a little wary of Java web frameworks that attempt to completely side-step JSP.