Using XMLC Generated Objects

Generated XMLC Objects are manipulated using the DOM API as well as element access methods generated by XMLC. Dynamic data is set in the DOM object tree and finally an HTML page is generated from that tree:

public class Hello implements HttpPresentation { public void run(HttpPresentationComms comms) { HelloHTML page = new HelloHTML(); String now = (new java.util.Date()).toString(); page.setTextTime(now); comms.response.writeHTML(page); } }
On execution of the run() method this will send back a page saying something like: Hi there, the local time is Sun Nov 5 14:25:00 CET 2000.

Name and Class Constants

String constants will be generated for each element name and class name. The use of string constants when calling DOM routines to locate elements ensures that a valid element is specified.

<INPUT NAME="myName" CLASS="class1 class2"> The constants public static final String NAME_myName; public static final String CLASS_class1; public static final String CLASS_class2;

These constants are used when accessing the DOM, for example:

NodeList elements = htmlObj.getElementsByName(htmlObj.NAME_myName);

Conclusion

XMLC is an interesting case of moving a well-known concept from one domain to another, in this case from browsers to servers.

The described method works for all XML document types, including Wireless Markup Language (WML). Using this approach makes it easy to serve different clients the same kind of dynamic content by simply replacing the HTML resources with WML pages. Why not give it a try on your Java-enabled Web Server?

More About DHTML
XMLC Development
Compiling HTML
XMLC Generated