Stripes 101: Getting Started - Stripes...and Java Web Development is Fun Again - page 18

<b>

Ê

<fmt:formatDate type="both" date Style="full"
value="${actionBean.date}"/>
</b>
</p>
<p>

Ë

<s:link beanclass="stripesbook.action.H elloActionBean"
event="currentDate">
Show the current date and time
</s:link> |
<s:link beanclass="stripesbook.action.HelloActionBean"
event="randomDate">
Show a random date and time
</s:link>
</p>
</body>
</html>

After the standard page directive that declares the page as a Java JSP,
the taglib directives import the Stripes tag library and the JSTL's for-
matting tags. I'll use the prefix s to represent the Stripes tag library;
most people use either s or stripes . The fmt prefix is standard for the
JSTL's formatting tags.

The code at Ê displays the value of the date property from HelloAction-
Bean . The ${actionBean.date} expression calls the getDate ( ) method on
the current action bean, and the

<fmt:formatDate> tag formats the

result by displaying both the date and the time in full.

At Ë , the <s:link> tag creates a link to the currentDate ( ) event handler
of HelloActionBean . Notice how clear this is in the tag: the beanclass=
attribute contains the fully qualified class name of the action bean,
and event= tells us the name of the method. The link to randomDate ( )
is created in the same way. When we read this code, we know exactly
which class and method is called by each link.

Just like that, we've made two types of bindings from the JSP to the
action bean: reading data and triggering an event handler, as illustrated
in Figure 2.3 , on page 32 . That was simple, wasn't it? We have links
that are bound to event handlers on HelloActionBean , which change the
date and redisplay the page by returning a forward resolution back to
hello.jsp . Let's talk a little more about these two key concepts: event
handlers and resolutions.