SiteMesh - still active? v2 vs v3 ?

Question

Hi,

I'm evaluating SiteMesh for use in our web applications. I've found two websites for SiteMesh

• version 2.4 (Jan 2009) -> http://www.opensymphony.com/sitemesh/
• version 3.0 (Sep 2009) -> http://www.sitemesh.org/

Looks like the same author is involved in both (Joe Walnes). So my question is - is SiteMesh still in active development? Are the two versions I found both stable? Is one deprecated? Are there any other alternatives to SiteMesh? We are looking for a tool that can act as a reverse proxy to a number of different web applications to apply a consistent look and feel, controlled separately from the apps. SiteMesh appears to be able to do that.. I think.

Answer 1

Sitemesh 3.0 still seems to be in alpha stage so 2.4.2 is the stable release to go for.

Sitemesh is a white labelling framework applied over your web app UI pages. It is not a 'reverse proxy' actually but a decorator.

Answer 2

Sitemesh is being used by Grails, so I don't think it's abandoned.

As an alternative, I would take a look to JTidy (if those sites are not already showing XHTML) to obtain well-formed XML and then parse or transform it with XSLT.

Regards.

Answer 3

SiteMesh would be the perfect tool for your job. The current stable release is from the 2.x branch and works like a charm.

GitHub says the last check-in to SiteMesh 3 was in January 2010 which suggests that is is not being actively developed anymore, which is really sad.