SiteMesh was built upon the Java Servlet 2.3 API. It is a web-page layout system and web-application integration system to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation, and layout scheme is required. It intercepts requests to any static or dynamically generated HTML page requested through the web-server, parses the page, obtains properties, and data from the content, and generates an appropriate final page with modifications to the original. It is ideally suited for Java based sites (particularly JSP) but can be dropped into any existing site that uses a Servlet engine including static, CGI, PHP, and ColdFusion generated pages.
