Jakarta Foundation Taglib Status

Overview
--------

The Foundation taglib is an attempt to incorporate a number
of ideas about JSP tag design into an integrated framework
for developing a web application. The functionality of the
Jakarta request, response, session, page, and application
taglibs is provided as an integrated whole.

The desgin is based on discussion in the taglib-dev list,
review of other tag libraries and frameworks such as Struts,
and my own experience designing taglibs. The discussion in
the taglib-dev list has been very valuable input and I am sure
many will find suggestions they made incorporated.

At the core of the foundation is a standard syntax which
can be used in tag attributes to refer to an objects data
for Arrays, Beans, Iterators, and Maps. See the Foundation
taglib docs and the JavaDocs for more information on how
this is implemented.

The ability to pass data between tags using objects
minimizes the need to pass data between tags using
strings within a tag body.

Foundation relies a great deal on Beans, introspection,
and reflection.  But it is designed to try and mimimze
the impact of this by using a static cache for Bean methods.
There is some extra overhead from invoking methods on beans,
but reading the BeanInfo for a class and doing introspection
only happens once.

I am very interested in starting a discussion on the taglib-dev
list about the Foundation taglib core design, features, syntax,
etc.  Capture that information into design and roadmap
documents, then move forward again with development.
All taglib developers are welcome to particpate and
contribute to the code once we have a final design and
roadmap.

Status of submission
--------------------

The taglib is not fully implemented. All the java source
files exist, but some of them are not fully implemented,
or if implemented, not fully tested.

The DateTag, PrintURLQuery, and SetPropertiesTag are just
stubbed in.  The features for using the HTTP Response are not
fully implemented.

Items to finish in current design
---------------------------------

Implement DateTag and support for use of Date's including features
from Datetime taglib.

Implement PrintURLQueryTag

Implement SetPropertiesTag

Finish implementation of HTTP Response related tags
and Beans, these are only partially done.

Implement Tag release() method where necessary.

Use regular expressions for doing character replacement
in the PrintValueTag, PrintFilterTag, and PrintURLQueryTag.

Items to design and implement
-----------------------------

Extend the attribute object syntax. Add the ability
to nest another object as the integer value
for an object array such as "array[loop.count]"
including the ability to do simple integer math
such as "array[loop.count + 1]".
Add the ability to nest another object as the key
for a Map such as "map{loop.name}".

Ability to do simple math when creating a number
using the NumberTag.

Logic tags to implement a switch { case: } type of
construct.

A way to implement continue and break in the forEach tag.

A random number tag.

A tag to generate a unique random key for a Map which
can be used as the value for static HTML form input
values.

Merge in tags to support regular expressions like the
regexp taglib.

Merge in tags to support jdbc like the jdbc taglib.

Implement JSP page translation phase validation of object syntax.

Internationalization (i18n) support for Strings used in exceptions.

Tags to support internationalization (i18n).

Research ways to optimize the code used to implement
the object syntax and beans.

Research ways to implement object pooling for beans
and script variables used by the taglib to improve
performance.