Weblets 1.0 has been released

Weblets 1.0 has been released at weblets.dev.java.net

Weblets is a Java servlet based framework that provides an easy way of loading resources (Javascript, CSS, images, …) directly out of JAR files.

For us the following features were the reason to start using it:

  1. Weblets has a full frontend api for neutral resource handling. This includes
    • a JSP API
    • JSF facelet integration
    • Using weblets from CSS and Javascript files is also possible.
  2. Weblets will automatically add Expires, If-Modified-Since headers to your HTTP responses. This enhances performance and is a way to implement Rule 3: Add an Expires Header from the Yahoo Performance team (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires)
  3. Weblets can automatically version your static resources. (eg. by adding a version id into the generated URL). Doing this accomplishes two things:
    • when a new version of eg. a CSS is in your jar, the URL location where it is served from will change (version id will be different). So there will be no browser issues of people still using the old version as the new URL will not yet be in the cache of the browser.
    • the first point allows you to define much more far future Expires headers; thus the chance that browser will use a cached version will be far higher, enhancing front end performance.

In the next post we will look at using Weblets 1.0 in a Weblogic 8.1 environment.

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