JMesa is a dynamic HTML table that allows you to filter, sort, paginate, export and edit your data however you need to. What you will find here is a carefully thought out API that is very easy to use and can be modified for your own needs. Note: JMesa requires JDK 1.5 or above. As of version 2.3.4 you can use the JBoss Retro project to run JMesa under JDK 1.4.

Notice: I am sorry to say that we need to abandon ship on the original JMesa groups page. You may have noticed that the spam is totally out of control now. Ideally I could just change the settings of the groups but I have lost ownership privileges. I have tried numerous times to get help but Google seems to be letting the whole groups management run on cruise control now. So I have set up a new groups page with the hope that by locking down the settings we can get the spam eliminated. Unfortunately this means that I have to approve everyone that wants to sign up. I do not mind doing it, but I really liked how easy it was to (non)manage the groups.

To see the live examples just download the example war file and place it in your servlet container. It was tested with Tomcat 6, but should work with any servlet container. If you need help with JMesa I would ask that you use the Google Groups set up. As similar questions get posted on the groups I will add those questions and answers to the Recipes page. Per user request the javadocs are now online as well!

10/16/2009 : The JMesa 2.4.5 release fixes some small bugs and offers a few improvements to the API.

Creating tables with JMesa is very easy. For instance to create an HTML table with every feature available can be accomplished in four lines of code:

TableFacade tableFacade = TableFacadeFactory.createTableFacade(id, request);
tableFacade.setColumnProperties("name.firstName", "name.lastName", "term", "career", "born");
tableFacade.setItems(items);
String html = tableFacade.render();

To fully customize this table is just as easy. You can find out more by reading the recipes, tutorials, and examples.

David Sills has an article on JMesa at JavaLobby. It is a great article that taps into just how customizable JMesa is! In addition there has been a sighting of JMesa out on Tech Blog.

Now that the apache commons BeanUtils 1.8 is released I would highly recommend using it with JMesa. The BeanUtils is a core library in JMesa and the 1.8 release works great with nested beans.

Tip: Did you know that you can save the state of the table so when a user returns to a JMesa table it looks exactly how they saw it last? I just updated one of our internal sites to use the feature throughout and it occurred to me that this may be a hidden feature to many developers.

10/25/2008 : This is more or less a call to the community that want Maven support. If you would like the JMesa jar file in the Maven repositories I have decided to leave it up to the community to finish the work started. There is some support for Maven in that you can pull the jar from my site.

7/09/2009 : I am posting this out as a call for help from the community and see if anyone is interested in updating the Grails plugin! If you are just contact me at jeff.johnston.mn@gmail.com and I will try to help in any way that I can.

It would be great to have more Locales supported out of the box. If your Locale is not currently supported you should consider taking some time to create a messages file and send it to me. More details are on the Messages page.

In Other News...

I started another project that Spring users may be interested in. It is called Configleon and solves the problem of loading property attributes in different environments and/or server contexts. With Configleon you can build one war file that can be deployed to every location.