BTW did you know that in JSP 2.0 you can create blocks of JSP code as ciustom tags or as variables and pass them into other JSP blocks. So you could pass the header & footer blocks into a JSP page or custom tag. This might be worth bearing in mind in your ‘composite view framework’ from a previous post. Is that what the ViewBeans project is gonna be? [James Strachan’s Radio Weblog]

Something along those lines. The general idea being that a web designer designs components, ‘pagelets’, small chunks of HTML, whatever, with placeholders for the data. Each ViewBean class is mapped to a different HTML component. The page is constructed by pulling the fields out of each bean in a list and merging them with the components. The completed HTML is then appended to the output stream. The therory being that the object graph in memory determines how the page is built. No logic on the page at all. Not quite sure how (or even if) it will work yet, but that’s half the fun…