Oh boy does that exist... There are incredibly many frameworks that can
handle this for you in various ways. Most are additions to J2EE, ie.
they are implemented on top of servlets (or jsp), but Java Server Faces
is *part* of J2EE itself. Struts is the "defacto standard", but lots of
others exist. Some template-oriented, some component/event-oriented etc.
Most implement the MVC pattern. You really should spend some time
evaluating some of the more common technologies to pick one that suits
your needs.

You can go grossly overboard and make sure all your data is xml. Then
just apply your xsl and you're OK. I have done that for 4-5 projects.

IMO, serlets are introduced badly (see server-side programming is just
the same as GUI). generally it's a bad idea to use servlets as
templates. Use them as a wrapper to decode and kick off operations from
the request and then forward onto a dynamically determined JSP.

It would help if JSPs were introduced before Servlets. It's rather
easier to do Hello World in a JSP.

See also JSTL. having a quick look at that site, it even looks quite
similar, superficially. JSTL uses tags, which you can write yourself,
although I would suggest you start with just JSTL and scriptlets where
necessary (scriptlets are embedded fragments of Java code).

Tom Hawtin

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