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I have tried to use Spring Web and MVC API along with the Tiles 2.1.4
This has been a learning experience while working with Spring Framework v3.0
and Tiles 2.1.4 version.
I tried to write a simple example on using Spring MVC and
Web module with Tiles as the view.
After working on basic part of my example for various files such
as my ExampleController extending Spring's Controller interface,
a *-servlet.xml file for the configuration settings related to
Spring Web, web application descriptor file (web.xml), Tiles related
setting in Tiles.xml(default file), so many related JAR files from
Spring's, Tiles's and Log4j's API distribution zipped files.
So we will be using Tiles for the user interface screens and Spring
for controller and Model beans for data.
Spring's Dispatcher Servlet is configured in web application
descriptor file, and the url mapping is mapped to *.go.
web.xml
....
....
<servlet>
<servlet-name>example-web-controller</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>example-web-controller</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.go</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
....
....
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Here in this example the servlet name I choose it to be
"example-web-controller", so I would have to provide another XML
file with a name as "example-web-controller-servlet.xml" for
Spring API to read it for looking up this example's controller
class file, along with other bean definitions such as
"TilesConfigurer" and "TilesViewResolver".
example-web-controller-servlet.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd">
<bean name="/sample.go" class="example.controller.ExampleController">
</bean>
<bean id="exampleTilesConfigurer"
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer">
</bean>
<bean id="tilesViewResolver"
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesViewResolver">
<property name="viewClass"
value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesView"/>
</bean>
</beans>
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I have used a very simple and bare minimum required tiles definitions
for this example only, such as follows:
tiles.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE tiles-definitions PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Tiles Configuration 2.0//EN"
"http://struts.apache.org/dtds/tiles-config_2_0.dtd">
<tiles-definitions>
<definition name="goodsample" template="/good.jsp">
<put-attribute name="message" value="Good JSP"/>
</definition>
</tiles-definitions>
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So, what we have got here, a definition with name as "goodsample"
and the corresponding JSP file for the template as "good.jsp",
with a single attribute as message.
In this example the JSP file "good.jsp" is having Tiles tag-library
that is being used as shown below:
<%@ taglib uri="http://tiles.apache.org/tags-tiles" prefix="t1" %>
<font color="green"><b><t1:getAsString name="message"/></b></font>
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URL I used for testing this example is as follows:
http://....../<web application name>/sample.go
While running this example, initially I encountered many "no class not
found exceptions", and this exceptions made me to look for many
different JAR files to look for. For you reference, I am going to list
those here in this page (one may or may not require all of these, but
in case these are required):
aopalliance-alpha1.jar
commons-beanutils-1.8.0.jar
commons-digester-2.0.jar
commons-logging-1.1.1.jar
jcl-over-slf4j-1.5.8.jar
jstl-api-1.2.jar
jstl-impl-1.2.jar
log4j-1.2.15.jar
org.springframework.aop-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.asm-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.aspects-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.beans-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.context-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.context.support-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.core-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.expression-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.web-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
org.springframework.web.servlet-3.0.0.RELEASE.jar
slf4j-api-1.5.8.jar
slf4j-jdk14-1.5.8.jar
tiles-api-2.1.4.jar
tiles-compat-2.1.4.jar
tiles-core-2.1.4.jar
tiles-jsp-2.1.4.jar
tiles-servlet-2.1.4.jar
(Please take care and read all those license files required for using these JAR
files, as appropriate)
All those who are trying to use Tiles of version 2.2.x along with Spring
version 3.0.x, there is a small finding I would like to share.
Initially I was using Tiles 2.2.1 with Spring Framework 3.0.0 release
for this example, but I was constantly getting NullPointerException
with the partial stacktrace as follows:
java.lang.NullPointerException
org.apache.tiles.definition.UnresolvingLocaleDefinitionsFactory
.getDefinition(UnresolvingLocaleDefinitionsFactory.java:102)
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After searching for clues for sometime, I tried with Tiles 2.1.4
and this example worked.
I think this example needs to be checked for making it compatible
with Tiles 2.2.1 with Spring Framework version 3.0.0.
If anybody interested and would like to take this up as an exercise
to solve this issue that I encountered and writen as above, you are
most welcome. If you have found the solution to the above exception,
and if you like to share it with all of us, then please drop your
findings to my email at
usingframeworks @ gmail . com
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as per this web site's privacy policy).
If anything missed out , please let me know at
techienjoy at yahoo . com
