page structure question/discussion
I am creating a web application that will have a a well used page layout - something like this (excuse my ascii art):
-
|.header............ |
-
|menu|...............|
|xxx......|...main..|
|xxx......|...............|
|xxx......|...............|
|...........|...............|
|...........|...............|
-
|.footer...............|
-
where the layout has
- header and footer section which are more or less always the same.
- a menu or tree structure on the left which *may* change when the user chooses an option (ie show sub-menu, sub-branch).
- a main section which will fully change based on the meny choice.
Ideally each of the sections should be defined in seperate jspx files, and the layout should bring all of the elements together.
My question is: what is the best way to acheive this...
I have started by having a header.jspx file which I include in a main.jspx with an <jsp:include...> tag. I indtended on doing the same with the footer.
The main problem comes with the other two sections, what sort of elements should these be? I see that oracle's adf has a panelPage element, but this seems fairly (overly?) complex. Perphas this can simply be done with a table:
<table>
<tr>
<td width="200"/> <!-- menu section -->
<td width="600"/> <!-- main section -->
</tr>
</table>
how is the dynamic swapping of the main section acheived? I assume (hope) there are some JSF parts that make this job a little easier (?)
any help or comments are greatly appreciated!!
/caj
[1715 byte] By [
caja] at [2007-10-2 21:35:01]
Sorry for my lack of JSF knowledge, but I cannot find any JSF element called "Facelet", I see that there are facets in JSF core... is this what you were refering to?
Do you know of any examples using this that I could study?
Web pages with this layout must be extremely normal/common... I would have assumed that this was a simple question to have answered...
Any help/direction is appreciated.
/caj
caja at 2007-7-14 0:48:57 >
Thanks for the input so far!!
I have looked a little at various solutions... but am still not sold...
The system I am creating has to be easily maintained, as it will not be maintained by me, and very standardised. The group I am working with are not keen on my use of too many external libraries... that is... if I use facelets, others here will have to learn and use facelets, and the application will be bound to using facelets. Here they use oracle for almost everything... so I have given their ADF a go but...
I tried making a demo using some of oracles ADF elements... but this did not go so well, and after reading discussions on other sites/forums, it seems that there is still quite a lot of problems with ADF (at least some elements, eg MenuTree) - on top of which, it is not ease of use.
I have also decided that if my page is made up of re-usable components, and the header and footer will more ore less always be the same, then I can just as well define them in my main page (not have them as seperate files/pages), and simply have an interactive meny on the left, with a "switcher" part for the bulk of my screen.
my problem is that I would like to implement this using JSF, and am unsure of which elements I should use, and how they should be connected.
any further comments are greatly apprecieated!!
/caj
caja at 2007-7-14 0:48:57 >
