The title of this essay is called "You make the decision." The point of this essay is to explore what it is like to develop a web application using a couple of popular tools that are available today. In order to do this, examples of using these technologies will be shown. This will give a nice first person account of what it is like to use these technologies on a daily basis.

The audience of this document is aimed at the people who are looking for alternatives to JSP as well as people who are currently using JSP and JSP based technologies and may not realize that there are other solutions out there that also address the many issues of developing web applications.

It is possible to navigate through the essay by simply clicking on the links at the bottom of each page. To return to this page at any time, click YMTD on the left side navigation.

This multi page document will compare usage of Velocity and JSP. In both cases, we have a framework of reusable code that makes life easier for building web applications by providing the "Model" and "Controller" portions of the MVC paradigm (Turbine and Struts). There is also a template language that provides the "View" portion (JSP and Velocity).

Please note that there are a bazillion different things that could be compared here. To be clear, we are not really trying to compare the feature set of each of these technologies as they both can get the job done. Instead, we are trying to compare what it is like to do the job with each of the tools.

The design concepts mentioned above that we will be exploring have been documented in detail in various locations, for more information, please refer to some of these reference URL's:

• Caucho MVC JSP
• Novell Connection MVC JSP
• Novell Connection MVC JSP
• Webmacro MVC
• Freemarker MVC
• Model 2
• The Pull Model

We would first like to thank the entire Velocity and Turbine teams for creating such great products. These groups are a 100% volunteer organization and some very talented engineers have come together from around the world to help make these products a reality and a success. They deserve a round of thanks and appreciation for their hard work and dedication.

Examples, comments as well as the some of the flow of this document has been borrowed with permission from Jason Hunter, author of the excellent O'Reilly Java Servlet Programming, 1st and 2nd Edition book. We do hope that you purchase his next book when it is released in order to support Java Servlets as well as Jason for his hard work.

Jason's book includes chapters covering Struts/JSP, Velocity, and other MVC technologies. We definitely encourage you to read the book to learn JSP and Velocity and see how they compare. What we do here (that Jason couldn't do in the book) is put JSP/Struts and Velocity/Turbine on the same page together for a direct side-by-side comparison.

This page tracks the list of changes in this essay.

It is very important to accurately compare these technologies. Therefore, a lot of effort has gone into this essay to state things as fairly and accurately as possible. Therefore, this entire essay is checked into Subversion and it is possible for you to provide feedback, but also patches that fix any mistakes. In other words, this is a community driven document. It is currently stored in the Subversion tree for the Velocity project in the xdocs directory.

If there are any changes that need to be made to this document, please do not hesitate to contact Jon Stevens.

On to the rest of the essay...

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