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Solution

Use Tiles with your Struts application.

Discussion

Tiles has been distributed with Struts since the Struts 1.1 release. Prior to that, it was

available as a separate add on known as Components. Tiles allows you to create page

component definitions that can be reused throughout your application.

The first step in using Tiles is to understand your needs. What are the common ele 

ments and what are the elements that change on every page? Is the layout the same

across your application? If not, would your application be more usable if it did have

a common layout?

To understand how to apply Tiles, this recipe walks you through its application for a

simple web site. Say you want to apply a common page layout, such as the one in

Figure 14 1, to every page of your application.

Figure 14 1.  Typical page layout with header, sidebars, and footer

Moving from left to right and top to bottom, you pull the page apart into its compo 

nent pieces described in Table 14 1.

440 | Chapter 14: Tiles and Other Presentation Approaches

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