Sitemesh is the shit!

Once upon a time I was working on a project developing a ticket management application. Someone high up had decided that we should certain frameworks. Struts 1 was one of them. We made a fine ajax application with struts and prototype.js. Unfortunately I had to follow my love and quit before it was finished.
Since the app was ajax-driven, we didn't use any templating engine. But later on I learned about tiles. Tiles was the shit at the time. And since struts 1 means xml-hell the tiles-hell was alright. Then wildcards came with struts 2, and wildcards in tiles. And the hell got cooler.
Now, there is convention in Struts, and tiles doesn't have a convention nor is working very well anymore. So I must find something new.
Yesterday I found sitemesh. One of those things you don't find unless you know what you're looking for. And I love it. It's simple and does what it should. Just like you wan't it. Beats tiles any day!

Instead of graceful degradation I always try to build apps that doesn't degrade. So, all sites must be nice ajaxified and work just as well (but impression heavier) without javascript enabled. But how! Well here is where my search for sitemesh comes in. Basically what is needed is an action which renders a decorated full site when called without javascript and only the simple view for javascript calls and of course use the same files to do this (I work in AM, I want maintainability). On the road I've found two readworthy sites on the subject. rkcole has an excellent tutorial demonstrating how to decorate an already written views with sitemesh. raibledesigns has an explanation on exactly what I'm trying to do. I'm putting together small app with those concepts (and alot others as well). I'll get back when I'm not too ashamed of it...