Been busy at work this week. I’m the king of JSP refactoring now. I’ve been tackling various issues in implementing a JSP/Struts/Tiles application with a mind towards IL8N. One of the biggest hurdles I’ve cleared (yeah! even my architect liked the solution I’ve come up with…I’m finally grasping this design stuff and design patterns!), is the building of name/value lists (for drop downs) from localized resource bundles.

If you’re familiar with Java, the PropertyResourceBundles are great, but are simple name/value pairs consisting of only Strings. If you want the value to be a Collection, let’s say, then you’re SOL.

Anyway, there are lots of challenges today with building an enterprise-class web application. The Struts/Tiles framework is a solid MVC framework with decent IL8N and layout control, but if you want a site with dynamic functionality to integrate with CMS-managed content there’s not a truly ideal solution out there (that I’ve seen yet). Hopefully we can get our CMS, Interwoven to fill in the gaps.

Still, there are so many issues due to the limitations due to using HTML/HTTP as a client stack. (Multiple button clicks, mutiple browsers, session timeouts, back button, etc.) It’s *SO* not intended for what it is used as these days. We really need a client stack rendering discrete states defined by styles, content, and forms (easily doable with XHTML, XML/XSLT, and custom tag languages like JSTL on the server side), communicating in a stateful manner with a server app via XML. I think we’re headed that way, we just eventually need to make the painful jump away from the HTML/HTTP model and realize that a page of information is different than a dynamic web application.

*Getting off my soapbox* Then, there’s still back end issues like transactions, failover, etc. but that’s all been around a while and I think in general J2EE implementations handle it all fairly well (if not as efficiently as possible). It’s an interesting challenge to piece together the puzzle, especially with the plethora of options from big vendors like IBM to open source solutions. I’ve been hearing a lot lately about Spring and Hibernate, for example, two open source solutions for business component configuration/reference and data caching respectively, but haven’t had a chance to play around with either yet.

Wow. I’m usually not into all this, but the migration efforts we’re facing here at work have got me somewhat interested in how all this works and what’s the best solution. (Not to mention all the intricacies we face due to our back end integration with legacy systems…cripes, that’s a whole other boring geek post!)