Wikipedia
SiteMesh
SiteMesh is a Java web application development framework developed by OpenSymphony.
According to OpenSymphony, SiteMesh:
- Is a web-page layout and decoration framework and web application integration framework to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation and layout scheme is required
- Intercepts requests to any static or dynamically generated HTML page requested through the web server, parses the page, obtains properties and data from content, and generates appropriate final page with modifications to original—based on Decorator design pattern
- Can also include entire HTML pages as a Panel within another page—similar to Server Side Includes, except HTML document modified to create a visual window (using document's Meta-data as aid) within a page. Using this feature, Portal type web sites can be built very quickly and effectively. This is based upon the well-known Composite design pattern.
- Built on Java 2 with Servlet, JSP and XML technologies. This makes it good for use with Java EE applications, however it can be integrated with non-Java server-side web architectures, like CGI ( Perl/ Python/ C/ C++/etc), PHP, and ColdFusion.
- Very extensible, designed for easy extension for custom needs