Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Why Tomcat Container should do this.

I was trying an example with @include and , in Tomcat 6. As we know if you use @include all the content in the child page (my_include.jsp), will be copied to your parent page during translation time, and any changes happens to the child will be reflected only when the parent page get recompiled (due to any changes happens in parent page). I was expecting the same and trying a simple example as below. 

File: parent.jsp 
 < html >
 < body>
  I am in parent< %@include file="child.jsp" %>< /br>
   < /body>
 < /html >
File: child.jsp 
 I am in Included page...

So when we hit parent.jsp, all the content which is in child.jsp should be copied to page.jsp and it will be compiled. After compiling parent.jsp, if any changes happen in child.jsp will not be displayed until when the parent.jsp is getting recompiled.

When I tried the same, but I was getting a different output, after compiling my parent.jsp and if I make any changes to my child.jsp Tomcat 6 recompiles my parent.jsp again and I was getting the updated changes in child.jsp in the output.

I was searching this topic and found that some of the advance container is friendly and they check if any @included pages are getting updated when a request comes to main (parent.jsp) file. If that so then they recompiling the parent page again. Finally it really important that this scenario was NOT GUARANTEED BY THE SPEC!

Why they do?

* If they containers are doing this (container may thing they are friendly with us), then what’s the difference between @include and in terms of getting the updated content from the child. 
* Doing this may not bring down the performance of the parent page, if the parent page has lots of included file. So any changes in any of the included file, the parent jsp should compile again by coping all the content from all the included jsp files.
* And finally this function is not portable, because this was NOT GUARANTEED BY THE SPEC! 

Any thoughts? Thank You
Posted by Mohammed Yousuff at 4:17 PM

1 comment:

Pravin said...

It may not be so inefficient to keep track of the parent child relation by the container, each time it compiles any jsp. So, it is not really scanning the parent JSP file each time. It may be keeping track of each jsp which is used as a child in other jsp. It may simply be keeping a map of parents for any jsp and so can trigger the compilation of parent.

December 21, 2009 at 6:32 PM

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