Markus Tripp’s Weblog

I’m using Apache Tomcat 6.0.13 which implements Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 specification. As I outlined earlier I’m using Stripes web application framework and JSPs and JSP tag files for rendering the page. With this combination I’m quite satisfied, because it enables me quick and efficient development.

Additionally I discovered the <jsp-config> configuration possibilities in the web.xml file. There you can configure the behavior of a group of JSP files. For instance I use the <page-encoding> and <trim-directive-whitespaces> configuration for all JSP files.

Page encoding I set to “UTF-8″ as default. In general it is a good suggestion to use UTF-8 from the beginning on with your web projects on any layer (database, application server, front-end). Because you will have less problems with character sets and special characters when it comes to internationalization and localization.

Trim white spaces is new in the JSP 2.1 specification, and very useful. When set to true, it removes all empty lines in the output before returning it to the browser. This makes your HTML more readable. Unfortunately it does not remove the empty lines in the JSP tag files

So my web.xml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
    http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
    version="2.5">

    <servlet>
        ...
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        ...
    </servlet-mapping>

    <jsp-config>
        <jsp-property-group>
            <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
            <page-encoding>UTF-8</page-encoding>
            <trim-directive-whitespaces>
                true
            </trim-directive-whitespaces>
        </jsp-property-group>
    </jsp-config>
</web-app>

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.