A Tiles Overview

In many ways, it's possible to consider Tiles as merely an extension of the Template tag library. But to do so would be to miss the real power of Tiles.

Using Tiles, you can define a base template page (called a layout ), and then base your entire Web site on that layout. Because Struts is so closely integrated with Tiles, you can use layouts in place of JSP files in your Struts configuration file, as you'll see later in the chapter.

As with most things related to Struts, it's easier to see how Tiles works if you start by looking at an example. In this case, you'll see how the Stocktracker application that we used in Chapters 5 through 11 can be rewritten to leverage Tiles.