INTERACTIVE WEB SERVICES WITH JAVA

The XML Class

Template are implemented by the XML class.

An XML object corresponds to an XML fragment possibly containing named gaps.

The XML class offers the following features:

template constants
the plug method for composing templates
printing the XML document represented by an object
the get method for dynamically loading a template from a URL

The JWIG system allows elaborate syntactic sugar for these constructions.

A template constant is written as:

[[ <table border="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr><td align="left"> <a href=[js]> <img border="0" src="http://www.brics.dk/~mis/file.gif"/> </a> </td></tr> <tr><td align="left"> <[name]> </td></tr> </table> <[rest]> ]]

where js, name, and rest are gaps.

Templates are plugged by writing, for instance:

options = options<[rest=templateOption<[inx=versionInx(contents[i]), date=versionDate(contents[i])] ];

This is different from JDOM documents in the following ways:

templates need not be constructed bottom-up
large chunks are written in normal syntax
the underlying data structure exploits sharing of common fragments
however, templates cannot be deconstructed (future work)

- and different from Servlets in the following ways:

documents need not be constructed linearly
well-formedness is easily guaranteed
escaping of special characters is automatic
specialized analysis is possible!