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Most of the time when building a custom tag library, you’re building it not to embed within a specific web application, but rather you’re building it for use in potentially many web applications, or even as a separate distributable for other developers.
It would be nice to have a Tag Library Project. This project would include the J2EE library (so you could compile of course), would generate just a source and bin file, would generate a tld for you, and would have a custom deployment which would basically build your jar for you, ready for deployment to a web server or inclusion into another web application project. If there was a TLD properties editor for each tag class that would be great.
My thoughts are you would create a New –> Project –> J2EE –> Tag Li brary Project. It would ask for your project name, for a description, display-name, short-name, uri etc. and then build the src & bin folders and a corresponding empty <project_name>.tld file.
You would then add New –> Tag. This would then have some wizard asking to extend TagSupport, or BodyTagSupport, etc. , ask for name, display-name, description and give a combo box for body-content. This would create the empty class and add the info to the TLD. There would be (rather than the outline view) a properties view where you could add attributes, with name, required, rtexprvalue, description, etc. This would also get built automatically to the TLD.
Does anyone else feel that this would be useful? Now I have to create a web project, go through this drawn out export process to get the right files, there’s basically no automated assistance at all with the TLD, heck there’s not even a New –> XML –> TLD template unless you make one yourself. It’s not at all fluid when you trying to build a tag library outside of an actual web project.
I don’t know that many people code Tag Libraries often enough to need a project type for it, but I might be wrong. We’ll let the poll speak for itself.
But I would hope that they do. Even if the number of developers is small, the number of libraries built could be large. I tend to split my tags up into smaller, more related groups rather than trying to publish this monster one package does all thing. All my GUI components are in one, my database access components in another, login authentication in another and so on. I’ve probably got 6 libraries as of right now.
Come on guys, help me out!
Either way, MyEclipse has been an excellent tool for me and remains my tool of choice! Great job guys.
Come on guys, help me out!
If users want it we will absolutely look into adding it… we always have a list of 20 big features or so, dictated by user demand and ordered accordingly. We shuffle the list when there’s a big outcry for things.
Even having something as simple as this would be handy.
Right clicking a project directory and select New –> Empty Tag
or New –> Body Content TagThen a dialog opens up (just like the servlet option) with the superclass (either javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.TagSupport or javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.BodyTagSupport) already loaded. The user enters the class name then another dialog opens up that asks for the name, body-content, description properties and the location of the tld to add it to. It then opens the tld, adds the basic entry and creates a new blank class file from a template just like Servlet.
Would this be difficult? Even this would save alot ot time to those who develop tags.
