Recommended JSP table taglib?

Question

Can you recommend a declarative table-generation taglib for JSP (with EL) that is still being maintained? I found a few, such as the Jakarata taglib and Display tag but nothing seems to have been updated in the past year or so.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Answer 1

It's true that Displaytag development seems to be moribund, but I'm using it in an application and other than a couple of minor issues we haven't had problems. The source is pretty clean and easy to customize/fix if you're desperate.

The main thing that's kind-of hard to do with Displaytag is to have a table viewing system that allows for user-driven column ordering. The ordering of columns is determined by the order of the column tags in the Displaytag JSP body, not by the order of columns as delivered in the table data structure by the server-side query action (or whatever generates the table data). It'd be possible to code around that explicitly in JSP, but it'd be quite a mess I suspect.

Answer 2

Display Tag which you mentioned is good one. It offers option for lot of customization.

Answer 3

Display tag is probably the most common, but it's still far for being good enough.I have used it intensively and it has severe performance issues, in special when you use custom Decorators. Decorators are needed much more often than they should be and you feel like writing html in old servlet's style. Ordering is also a mess and it's made alphabetically, specially painful with dates in dd/MM/yyyy format ( I made a dirty workaround writing yyyyMMdd with display:none first of the formated value). Parameter propagation for links generated by the tag is another headache, not impossible but very stupid to waste your time in such matter. Exporting options are mostly nice and can save you a bit of time if your client just want what displaytag offers. External pagination is also good.