A Web portal is an application that aggregates multiple Web applications on a
single Web page. Popular examples of portals are My Yahoo (my.yahoo.com) and
My MSN (my.msn.com). These portals allow users to aggregate multiple Web
applications (like Stock Quote, News, and Weather). In addition these portals
allow users to personalize and customize the presentation and content of the
individual Web application. This means users may do both: change the color,
style, and layout of the page, and specify the content - list of stocks in a
Stock Quote application and categories of news in a News application.
The Java community has created a standard for developing portal applications;
it's called the Portlet API. The individual Web applications described above
are called portlets. In August 2003, Portlet API specification, JSR 168
(http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168), complet... (more)
XML/XSL are widely used for publishing and EDI. This article shows how
XML/XSL can be used effectively for IT Web development by overcoming the
disparities between relational data and XML.
What's the best way to develop Web applications driven by relational
databases (the backbone of current IT)? Would the answer lead us down the
road to XML/XSL? If so, how can we convert relational data to XML?
In Part 1, I describe the appeal of XSLT as a presentation engine, why we
should retrieve relational data as XML, and briefly review how XSQL, a
promising tool from Oracle, converts relat... (more)
C++ brought into vogue the concept of interfaces, abstractness, and
implementations. Java went a step further and formalized them with proper
keywords for each of the concepts. There are a substantial number of patterns
in which interfaces, abstract classes, and classes can be combined for
various purposes. You only have to look at the book Design Patterns, by Erich
Gamma et al (Addison-Wesley), to realize the importance of recognizing these
constructs.
Constructing a software program that you expect to have a long life is an
attempt to evolve its functionality over time, withou... (more)
In Part 1 of this article (XML-J, Vol. 2, issue 4) I discussed the motivation
and desire to adapt XSL and JSP to transform the pervasive relational data to
HTML.
In Part 2 I discuss a Java-centric design approach to converting relational
data to an XML DOM and how Xalan can transform the XML DOM to HTML. In
addition, I provide sample code for both Xerces and Xalan. I also demonstrate
practical ways to use XSL to transform XML to HTML, and supply appropriate
references.
Obtaining Relational Data as XML on the Fly
The design goals for converting relational data to XML in an HTML d... (more)
Satya Komatineni is Chief Technology Officer of INDENT, Inc and the author of a Java based RAD framework for developing J2EE based HTML applications. The product has the distinction of supporting multiple html transformations (XSL,JSP, proprietary templates) while utilizing the same data abstraction to interact with EJBs, relational databases and ERP systems. After earning an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, worked with LAN based collaboration technologies, C++ patterns and frameworks, Java and Web based frameworks in a distributed environment.
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
