Calyxo MVC Web Application Framework :: Calyxo Intro :: Sample Application

Using Panels

Now let's give our application a homogeneous user interface. We'll define a layout template shared by all views and use the panels dispatcher to compose our pages dynamically from the templates. This ensures consistency, removes redundancy and greatly improves maintainability. You should have read the introduction to Calyxo Panels component, before you proceed.

To enable panels for our sample application, we need to

provide panel definition files for our modules
create JSP templates, referenced by panel definitions
adjust our controller configuration to use panels

Yet simple, our layout will use a cascading stylesheet (CSS) to define layout details. That is, we will have to provide that css file, too.

We'd like to present the panel definitions first, though the referenced JSP templates don't exist, yet. This way, we know exactly, which templates we need to write.

Warning

This is not a course on web design! Our design reflects the need to keep the example short and simple to remain presentationable.

Before we forget: copy CALYXO_HOME/calyxo-panels/calyxo-panels-*.jar to /WEB-INF/lib now.