Your Toolkit

When the application server you are using receives an HTTP request for a page in an Escenic publication, it is passed to the Escenic request filter chain described in Servlet Filters. The last filter in the chain passes it to the Escenic master template file (usually called common.jsp). The filters in the filter chain have verified that it is a legitimate request, created the beans you will need to respond to the request and placed them in the request scope so that you can access them using the JSP expression language and tags.

Your job, then, is to create a common.jsp file that will generate appropriate responses to the requests. (Usually you will want to break the task up into a number of smaller, more specialized JSP files: common.jsp then just operates as a "clearing house" that examines the requests and forwards it to another JSP file.)

You have the following tools at your disposal in responding to requests:

• HTML to create the static layout

• The beans that have been created for you and the information they contain

• The JSP expression language for accessing the information in the beans

• JSTL tags for

  • creating logical constructs such as if statements and loops

  • passing control between templates

  • formatting retrieved values such as numbers and dates

• Escenic tags for accessing information that cannot be extracted from a request's beans using the expression language alone

• The content-type resource file, which tells you what types of content items to expect, and the fields and relations the different content types contain.

• The layout-group resource file, which tells you what section, grid and element templates you need to create, and also defines the logical structure of a publication's section front pages.