I'm just starting a project that's using JavaServer Pages (not Java Server Pages) aka JSP for doing "templates" -- i.e. making dynamic HTML content. The first thing I'm trying is really quite simple -- create an object and print out one of it's values.

Here's the relevant class:

public class Entry {
  String hour;

  public String getHour () {
    return this.hour;
  }
}

Java/JSP is big on setters and getters, that is, functions named a certain to get access to object attributes. There's plus and minuses to this, but from a conceptual level I thought it was quite clear that we are thinking "Entry objects have an attribute 'hour'", even if we have to use setHour/getHour to access values.

Now, in Cheetah, Django (and probably Rails, though I haven't looked) you'd access the attribute 'hour' in a template language as follows:

e.hour

Simple -- the last thing you want to be doing in a HTML template is dumping tons of programming language code into it, making it hard to read and maintain. Cheetah is quite clever about this: it looks at 'e' and does all sorts of introspection to figure out how to get 'hour', so you don't have to do that yourself.

So how do we do this in JSP (like in 2008)?

e.getHour()

Give me a break. Maybe there's another way to do this? If there's performance reasons to be wedded to this format (though I can't see it since everything is compiled) why not invent a new syntax like

e::hour