ANN: dotJ

Question

dotJ Software is pleased to announce its new dotJ Custom Tag Library!
dotJ contains a powerful set of tags that will help you greatly reduce your JSP development efforts. This feature rich library attempts to trivialize the most common idioms web developers face when building JSP based web applications. Check out dotJ and our comprehensive set of samples at http://www.dotjonline.com.
dotJ Tags include:
Grid Tag:
Let dotJ draw your SQL ResultSet as an interactive data grid. Features include automatic column sorting, customized paging, and field hyperlinking. In addition to binding the grid to a SQL ResultSet, you can also bind to your own Collection of custom JavaBeans.
HTML Form Tags:
This set of HTML form tags allow you to provide sophisticated forms for your clients with very little effort. This framework of tags has built in support for pre-defined and custom validation of any form field. Field validation is always done server-side and is done client-side for uplevel browsers (IE4+, NS6+). If you've previewed Microsoft's upcoming Web Controls in .Net, then you'll correlate with our set of HTML form tags.
I/O Tags:
Perform inline SQL using the sql tag. Send text or HTML emails using the simple but powerful email tag, which supports cc, bcc, and attachments. Include dynamic content using the content tag. Other tags include filesize, lastmodified, and encode/decode tags.
Upload Tag:
Upload files to your server by using the advanced upload tag. You can limit the number of bytes the upload request will process. Also, you can allow or deny certain mime types. In addition, you can specify where to upload the files. The upload tag is scriptable, so you can access other form fields and also query any errors or rejected files.
Utility Tags:
Rotate images sequentially or randomly using the image rotator tag. Or rotate advertisements using your own impression scheme using the ad rotator tag. Detect which browser a visitor to your site has using the snigger tag.
Format Tags:
Display currencies, numbers and dates in any format or locale using the currency, number and date tags. Master the display of textual data using the lowercase, uppercase, mixedcase, and titlecase tags. Parse a Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) file using the stylesheet tag.
So come see for yourself at http://www.dotjonline.com. If you're a no-nonsense, hard-core JSP developer, you'll understand how this new and powerful tag library can help reduce your coding effort on your next JSP project.
dotJ Software
"Quickening the Pace of JSP Development"

Answer 1

All of the tags have been carefully designed so that they may be used by servlet developers.
As you know, all JSP executes as servlets (thanks Sun!) so the only thing to handle is when a tag depends on HttpServletRequest or HttpServletResponse. The tag architecture sets this up automatically for the tag handler. But this must be done manually for servlets. So for servlet developers, a public method is exposed on the tag handler where you can pass HttpServletRequest or HttpServletResponse when needed.
For example the upload tag could be programmed as:
Upload upload = new Upload();
upload.setFolder("/usr/uploads/");
    ...  set other attributes
upload(request);
if (upload.hadError()) {
    ... display error
} else {
    ... success
}Our initial focus right now is JSP developers but we will be building another set of examples on the site using strictly servlets to demonstrate your exact question.
Not sure what is meant by transaction safe for the paging used for the grid. Can you explain in more detail?
The grid tag doesn't actually execute any SQL, it only is responsible for drawing the rows contained in a ResultSet.