Last month I built a JSP and Servlet-based list paging framework to take long lists of items and display them over multiple pages, much like google. Before I did this, I of course looked around for free, public implementations of the same thing as I see no reason to re-invent the wheel. However, I wasn't able to find one to fit my needs. JSP Tags has a pager library that seems to be very popular, but it requires roundtrips to the server for each page and wants to manipulate the URL for its refreshes. I wanted to avoid (obvious) roundtrips and have more control over the refresh behavior.

It should be noted that I only had IE 5.5+ (IE6, really) as a target platform, although I usually make reasonable attempts to keep the latest Mozilla happy as well. This is a nice luxury I know and it likely made my solution more workable.

There are essentially two parts to my framework. On the server side, there's the ListPager object that handles breaking a list into "pages" as well as filtering items out of the list that don't match a given Predicate. This object is built by a ListPagerFactory and then stuffed into the request. The request itself is initiated in a hidden IFRAME that is created by the other half of the framework, the listPager.js javascript file. This script is responsible for initiating requests to the server for new pages and then handling a "callback" indicating the latest page has loaded and should be integrated into the visible page.

[...blah blah, more explanation how it works...]

The reason I felt I should blog this is that I'm debating internally if I should release my framework to the public, probably via SourceForge. I feel like I need to justify why the world needs another paging framework. I guess I'm unsure if the answer "well, I needed one" is good enough.

I'll keep thinking about it...