JSPs, presentation, what the... (was ABartells Java thing)

Joe, I'm gonna ask for some explanations.  I'm including the relavent thread
to my inquiry.

> > One of the reasons I'm playing with servlets now is to try 
> and duplicate an 
> application (or part of an application) I wrote in RPG for displaying 
> customer service data on the web. The presentation is 
> completly controlled 
> by the URL and at a lower level the account number signed on 
> with. In other 
> words, the same program will look like an office depot site 
> for office 
> depot, and it will look like Kmart for Kmart. All by the URL 
> and a few 
> "flags and switches". At the account level, each account has 
> the ability to 
> control what data is displayed, in what order, if the 
> particular column is 
> sortable and/or searchable, and what the heading of each 
> column is. (hard 
> to explain, there's a TON to it). 
> ---------
> It's not hard to explain at all, Brad.  This is the same type 
> of "user state" as used in most decent websites these days 
> (My Yahoo, My MSN), and nearly all desktop applications - the 
> ability to customize the UI.   If you were to use JSPs rather 
> than CGI, your changes are actually trivial, because you 
> would simply call a different JSP to get the logos and stuff, 
> but the JSP would access data through widgets populated by 
> the host servers.  In that case, there are NO switches; it's 
> simply a hierarchical tree of URLs.
> 

you'll have to explain this because I don't think this is from experience
but more from a "this is how I bet it's done" view.

This is actually how our PC web programmers do it, but with Cold Fusion
instead of JSP.  They admitted years ago they messed up doing it this way
instead of having one CGI that reads db tables to figure out the layout of
the pages.  A different JSP for each URL?  No thanks.  Maybe if you have 3
max sites, but we're not talking that.  Or maybe your use of hierarchical is
not correct and that's causing the confusion.

You say there are "no switches" this way.  Well, you're arguing semantics
again.  Something needs to tell the server which JSP to load.  To me, that
would be some CGI that is producing dynamic output, and to get that you have
to read env. vars and then act accordingly.  this is a switch.  If this, do
this.. if this, do this, etc.. etc..

Last question for you:
"JSP would access data through widgets populated by the host servers"

What the heck does this mean?  Don't get me wrong, it sounds good, but it
sure is a general statement.  Using a term like "widgets" may be great for
high level discussion, but then again anything is possible at a high level.

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