We encountered a very big problem in our small startup.
We have a backend Java EE server with tomcat + spring + hibernate + mysql etc..
Our frontend is comprised of jsp files that include CSS HTML JS etc..
currently we have the following issue:
Our front end guy doesnt know anything but pure html \ css \js. He develops only on dreamweaver (don't ask why..)
We have set up a git repository for the src code.
But, he cant run the jsp files on the dreamweaver (it says the files (jsp) are server side files and it cant open them)
How can we make the whole development process work?
is it possible to connect our server to the dreamweaver?
if not - how can we make this work?
The first thing which comes to my mind is: How did it work before?
You must be either using this setup since some time and then collaboration between front end and backend guys must work somehow, or yo set this up recently, then I can tell you that JSP is an outdated technology since several years.
I would further assume, that within a small startup you have the possibility to change setups without caring about company policies and the need to be more efficient in your development process than some big company, that's why I strongly propose to invest that time now and save probably more later.
The default server-centric web technology in Java EE is JSF in combination with Facelets as view technology. For your case this would both benefit the backend guys, as they don't have to maintain JSPs any longer with all their problems like missing templating, mixed logic and view, missing syntax check for HTML output, and the frontend guy, as he can work in XHTML, which is basically the HTML he knows plus the usage of tag libraries.
We use this combination in principle in all our projects, since the page layout is either done by a web design agency or set by corporate identity and we take the main parts of the HTML and use it as our XHTML views.