Are you using some old version of JSP? Not unlike many other mature technologies, many times people are just victims of some arbitrary corporate standard and not the tech itself.
As far as limited, I looked at Django strictly for it's vaunted templating prowess and didn't see anything that isn't easily reproducible in JSP. There could be some magic there but I missed it.
For verbosity, sure, fn:toLowerCase(string) is technically more verbose than string|lower, but marginally so.
Version 2.0 (current version is 2.1). Apparently upgrading is not trivial (due to Spring framework or whatever... I don't know, I'm not familiar with the Java stack).
You mention an example where JSP fares best; there are a lot of examples that don't come out looking too great though, such as time/date/decimal conversion, the obnoxious syntax for if/else, etc. A lot of Django's other filters just don't exist in JSP.
But that aside, there are larger scale issues -- composition of templates via blocks in Django/Jinja, which is a lot easier and more flexible than Apache tiles; the lack of auto-escaping in JSP; and the forced XML syntax, even at the expense of valid HTML (see what it does to script includes or empty divs, without a <!-- --> in between).
Comments
Are you using some old version of JSP? Not unlike many other mature technologies, many times people are just victims of some arbitrary corporate standard and not the tech itself.
As far as limited, I looked at Django strictly for it's vaunted templating prowess and didn't see anything that isn't easily reproducible in JSP. There could be some magic there but I missed it.
For verbosity, sure, fn:toLowerCase(string) is technically more verbose than string|lower, but marginally so.
Version 2.0 (current version is 2.1). Apparently upgrading is not trivial (due to Spring framework or whatever... I don't know, I'm not familiar with the Java stack).
You mention an example where JSP fares best; there are a lot of examples that don't come out looking too great though, such as time/date/decimal conversion, the obnoxious syntax for if/else, etc. A lot of Django's other filters just don't exist in JSP.
But that aside, there are larger scale issues -- composition of templates via blocks in Django/Jinja, which is a lot easier and more flexible than Apache tiles; the lack of auto-escaping in JSP; and the forced XML syntax, even at the expense of valid HTML (see what it does to script includes or empty divs, without a <!-- --> in between).