Hi--

I'm seeking advice on what technology to deploy for the UI layer of our homegrown digital library
platform. We anticipate full Java and SOAP APIs for power users (possibly with bindings for other
languages as well), but we also hope to make the web tier available to folks who may not know more
than simple HTML. So the key requirement is to separate the logic from the  markup (from the
presentation) as much as possible so that folks  who just want to change the "HTML" can do so
without getting  freaked out by having to mess too much with the conditionals and looping and
other logic related to the UI. Requirements in somewhat more gory detail are at:
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/cui_requirements_200505.pdf

We don't do much in our production sites with PHP, Python or Ruby; these seem pretty oriented
toward programmers, right? Historically, we're used XSLT (programmers do the rough draft and the
HTML folks try to edit the markup) but we've done recent work with Struts and using the
struts-logic and struts-bean JSP tag libraries (no raw Java on the JSP pages; the programmers do
the Struts action classes but the HTML folks do the <logic:> and <bean:> tags) and that's gone
fairly well. We're now evaluating JSTL, which seems to blend XSLT with JSP  tag libraries fairly
well.

What are y'all doing out there? What are your thoughts on the best UI layer that gives
non-programmers freedom to edit markup and hides the bulk of the UI logic?

--

Steve Toub
California Digital Library