Using Tiles 2

Download the tiles2 file from the maven repository and verify the newest version at homepage do tiles2.

You also need in the following jars in your /WEB-INF/lib folder from the jarkata commons project:

  • commons-beanutils-1.7.0
  • commons-collections-2.1
  • commons-digester-1.7

web.xml

In order to use tiles2 we have to add the servlet definition/mapping to the web.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
        <display-name>Nome da aplicação</display-name>

        <context-param>
                <param-name>javax.servlet.jsp.jstl.fmt.localizationContext </param-name>
                <param-value>messages</param-value>
        </context-param>

        <servlet>
                <servlet-name>vraptor2</servlet-name>
                <servlet-class>org.vraptor.VRaptorServlet</servlet-class>
            <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
        </servlet>

        <servlet-mapping>
                <servlet-name>vraptor2</servlet-name>
                <url-pattern>*.logic</url-pattern>
        </servlet-mapping>


        <!--servlet tiles2 -->
        <servlet>
                <servlet-name>tiles</servlet-name>
                <servlet-class>org.apache.tiles.servlet.TilesServlet</servlet-class>
                <init-param>
                        <param-name>definitions-config</param-name>
                        <param-value>/WEB-INF/tiles-defs.xml</param-value>
                </init-param>
                <load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup> 
        </servlet>      


        <welcome-file-list>
                <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
        </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

Layout - /template/layout.jsp

Let's create the basic layout. In our example we use a table, which has some tiles tags embedded. These tags will be replaced dynamically.

Put this file in the /templates/ folder of your web application (like any other template file).

<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-tiles" prefix="tiles" %>
<head>
        <title>
                <tiles:getAsString name="title"/>
        </title>
</head>
<body>
<table> 
<tr>
        <td>
                <tiles:attribute name="header"/>
        <td>
</tr>
<tr>
        <td>
                <tiles:attribute name="body"/>
        </td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

We divided the page in two parts: header e body.

This layout would be the same in Tiles 1.

header and body - /template/header.jsp and /template/body.jsp

Create a jsp file header.jsp for the header information, for example:

<b>VRaptor and Tiles2</b>

Also create the body.jsp, for example:

The is the body .....

tiles-defs.xml

The tiles-defs.xml is mapping file between layout and header/body. Put the file in the WEB-INF/ folder with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
 <!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="base.layout" template="/templates/layout.jsp">
        <put name="title"  value=":: Tiles with Vraptor ::" />
        <put name="header" value="/templates/header.jsp" />
        <put name="body"   value="/templates/body.jsp" />
    </definition>

</tiles-definitions>

The dtd version should be 2.0, please don't copy the any different version.

index.jsp

Let's create a page index.jsp to use our new defined layout. It will use the tiles:insertDefinition tag to call the layout.

<%@ taglib uri="http://struts.apache.org/tags-tiles" prefix="tiles" %>

<tiles:insertDefinition name="base.layout"/>

That's it. Tiles 2 is configured and ready to use with VRaptor.

Configuration

For this tutorial we used the following configuration:

  • JDK 1.5 e JDK 1.6
  • Tomcat 5.5.17
  • Vraptor 2.3