I've spent part of the past 8 months working on a set of tags that can be used in any ColdFusion or JSP page to produce physics plots. These tags are collectively called the AIDA Tag Library.
Our version of the AIDA Tag Library is tagged in CVS as v1r0p2 under the module name aidatld, and this is the version I have deployed to GLAST's ColdFusion servers and released for people to download and begin using. This is the version used by the GLAST pipeline front end and the tag I have given to the CCB.
I have documented in Confluence how to install the tags. However, they are already installed on GLAST severs so that web developers can just start using them. I have created several examples of both ColdFusion (.cfm) pages and JSP pages (.jsp) on the glast-ground web site to show detailed examples of their use.
Jim Lemon also has some examples on his latrends ColdFusion application
.
Max Turri is merging our version of the AIDA Tag Library into a similar body of work he has worked on. Once the merge is complete, Max, Tony Johnson and I will support and continue to develop this version of the AIDA Tag Library together as a team, so that we will all be working on the same code base.
The main differences between the versions I and Jim Lemon have worked on, and those that Max has worked on, are the following:
- Native support of time history plots
- Native support of database queries, meaning all database types (including DATE, DATETIME and TIMESTAMP SQL column types) for ColdFusion database queries, JSP databases queries, and Java database queries (yes, there are actually three types). This was required to do time history plots.
- Supports wildcard matching of histograms in ROOT files (or any object supported by AIDA in any data store supported by AIDA). For example, specifying cal would return all histograms with cal somewhere in the name. This was required by the SAS System Tests to allow interactive browsing of large numbers of histograms (note that the version of System Tests I am referring to was superseded by a newer version written by Max Turri and Tony Johnson).
- Full support for all JSP scopes (page, request, session and application).
- Full support for all versions of the JSTL Expression Language and ColdFusion expression language.
As a small aside, it appears that there may be some confusion surrounding ColdFusion servers, and that some people may have the impression that a ColdFusion server is somehow separate from a JSP server. They are in fact the same thing. You can think of a ColdFusion server as a JSP server plus more. For example, ColdFusion (being a commercial product from Macromedia) supports Dreamweaver integration, optimized database drivers, etc. To be sure, there are different versions of JSP servers (Sun Microsystems has released three separate version of the specification), but our version of the AIDA Tag Library runs on all of them (which includes ColdFusion servers). We run ColdFusion on a JRun4 server, which is certified by Sun Microssystem as a fully J2EE compliant server.
