Blogger Is A JSP Site’s Friend Too

At work there was a desire to put news items onto an internal page of a web application our customers log into. After the request was made, there was talk of including a page supplied to us by our internal customer representatives, providing a form they could type news into, etc. Basically a variety of solutions that all involved us writing something and/or getting directly involved in posting news. Perhaps even teaching HTML to somebody who normally just dealt with numbers and people.
I felt that was just a waste of resources. Why not just use Blogger? It has a better interface than anything I’m going to throw together in a couple of days. It will generate a page and dump the result via FTP to another server (exactly what we needed). And it doesn’t need my intervention to get the news up. Blogger is perfectly capable of generating a JSP page instead of an HTML page as its output, and if you dump it in a directory where the server (e.g. Tomcat) will notice that the original page has changed, the server can automatically recompile the page next time someone requests it and they will have updated news but any Java scriptlets on the page will still provide their dynamic output.
When you are setting up Blogger, just make sure it knows that the output file it will generate has a JSP extension, the template for your page will be a normal JSP page with whatever scriptlets and custom tags you normally use. You just have to include the Blogger tags in the section of the page where you want the news to appear. Then Blogger will replace its tags and only its tags with the HTML representing the latest news items, produce a JSP page ready for processing, and publish it to its final destination via FTP.
Definitely an easier solution and it can be setup in thirty minutes or less vs. trying to cobble together your own solution or setup some software like Movable Type or WordPress.


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