(in reponse to Dan’s great posting: “A Retrospective on HTL: The Wrong Solution for the Problem”)

Dan writes that with JSP there is a language out there which is powerful and useful, and that’s hardly a good reason for an experienced developer to switch to another language (well, besides the default XSS handling of HTL).

Well, I think I can agree on that. An experienced java web developer knows the limits of the JSP and JSP scriptlets and is capable to develop maintainable code. And to be fair, the code created by these developers is hardly a problem.

And Dan continues:

I am more productive writing JSP code and I believe most developers would be as well, as long as they avoid Scriptlet and leverage the Sling JSP Taglib and Sling Models.

And here I see the problem. Everything works quite well if you can keep up with the discipline. In my experience this works

As long as you have experienced developers who make the right decisions and

As long as you have time to fix things in the right way.

The problems begin when the first fix is done in the JSP instead of the underlying model. Or logic is created in the JSP instead of the creation of a dedicated model. Having such examples in your codebase can be seen as the begin of something called the broken window theory: it will act as an example how things can be done (and get through with it) unless you start fixing right away.

It requires a good amount of experience as developer, discipline and assertiveness towards your project lead to avoid implementing the quick-fix and doing it right instead, as it typically takes more time. If you live such a culture, it’s great! Congratulations!

If you don’t have the chance to work in such a team — you might need to work with less capable developers or you have a high fluctuation in your team(s) — you cannot trust each individual to do right decisions in 99 per cent of all cases. Instead you need a number of rules, which do not require too much disambiguation and discussion to apply correctly. Rules such as

Use HTL (because then you cannot implement logic in the template)

Always build a model class (even if you could get away without)

It might not be the most efficient way to develop code, but in the end you can be sure, that certain types of errors do not occur (such as missed XSS protection, large JSP scriptlets, et cetera). In many cases this outweighs the drawbacks of using HTL by far.

In the end using HTL is just a best practice. And as always you can deliberately violate best practices if you know exactly what you are doing and why following the best practices prevents you from reaching your goal.

So my conclusion is the same as Dan’s:

Ultimately, your choice in templating language really boils down to what your team is most comfortable with.

If my team has not proven track record to deliver good JSPs in the past (the teams I worked with in the last years have not), or I don’t know the team very well, I will definitely recommend HTL . Despite all the drawbacks. Because then I know what I get.