On Wed, 2010-06-23 at 10:36 +0100, Alex Rodriguez Lopez wrote: > I've been using Tiles and always found it confusing a little bit, now > that I'm starting to test Sitemesh my vote would be for this last one. > They accomplish the same thing, only Tiles is like saying each time "my > page is made up of this, this and this". Sitemesh is more about taking a > piece of a page and decorate it into a full page (more like > "intercepting" or filtering).
I'd say that Tiles is like saying only _once_ that my base page is made of this and this... and each subsequent page you should say "extends" the base page, in my case this means that a different jsp is embedded into the body which means a definition only has one line. Each definition can of course override any of the content in base, for instance my base has a left menu, header, body and footer all defined, a tiles definition typically overrides the body portion, but say I made a "secureLayout" definition then every page that a user needs to log in to see will simply extend the "secureLayout" definition. I have a layout for displaying records... "recordLayout" which redefines the header and footer to provide information such as where the data was derived and how many records and navigation between the pages of the table. JSP's that then display records over ride the body section of "recordLayout" which simply overrides a different header and footer of the Secure Layout. I don't think you can get much more simple than Tiles. I'm not sure if it is the right approach if you had a really modular layout (say you needed to let users add widgets to any page). But if the layout is really hierarchical I'd say it's the way to go.
