The BEA WebLogic Portal netui framework offers a useful method of creating and handling web forms. I’ve come to like how easy they are to use, specially with the Workshop wizards, one of the few advantages of using Workshop. I also like how you can put almost anything in a form class, like an XML bean generated class, and make their fields available on the form using the X-script notation (but why not EL!?). However, in the project I did in 2005 for a client, the time came when we were saying “I wish netui:textBox could do this, and netui:anchor could do that…” And although there’s not much to extend within the realm of JSP’s, tags are a noteworthy exception.

So we started to extend quite a few netui tags. Unfortunately, there was virtually no documentation to be found on this subject on BEA’s site or elsewhere on the Internet. The tag classes do not come with any apidocs either. Therefore, the first step was to decompile the tags we wished to extend, in order to uncover their internal workings. Having done this, I believe there’s no way you’re going to extend these tags without decompiling them. There’s just too much going on inside. Once you’ve figured this out though, it’s fairly easy to add your own stuff.
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