DPM Scriplets vs JSTL

Hi all,
We are upgrading to WEM 8.5, and use DPM to render our sites.
We use a mixture of portlets and display views that point to .jsp files to render our content.
All of our JSPs are JSP Scriplets. Based on the Innovate sample site it appears that Open Text is moving away from scriplets and using JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) instead.
It would be a large effort for us to switch from scriplets to JSTL, and I'm wondering if it would be worth it for us to make the transition.

Has anyone else made the transition from scriplets to JSTL? Or, are you still using scriplets? If you did switch to JSTL, did you noticed any improvements, or were things more difficult?
For people that are using JSTL, any issues/complaints with it?

Thanks!

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Comments

Eric Borisow

We have two sites using JSTL. The one site started as JSTL and has been in production since 2008. The other was updated in 2010 to JSTL. We have had no issues with JSTL and hate when we have to rely on scripting. Scripting makes the code harder to read and harder to add HTML in the middle of code. The one thing we are not doing is using the JSTL XML library that is in some of the newer examples. We are only using Java objects. We recently upgraded to 8.5. Our pages that are using JSTL were easy to update. The older JSPs that used script code - not so much.

The other nice advantage is that it enables encapsulation. Theoretically, we could swap out the code that is building the objects and keep the code JSTL code that renders the site without any changes.

Vladislav_Polonskiy

We are in a similar boat. We do use scriptlets all over the place in JSP overrides but next to none JSTL.

JSTL in Java world has been for many years a cleaner approach for reasons described by Eric - much easier on HTML developers who don't code in Java, presentation separation from business logic, etc... However we don't have pure HTML developers and still find it much easier to debug scriptlets vs. JSTL classes as no classes recompilation is required. I know that some users of our platform have started using JSTL now so it is an ongoing debate and I don't know if/when we will switch existing code to that technology.