Re: HTML to XML, vice versa

I can do it easily because I use a decorator class that in turn uses a factory 
class.  To do this, I break down the data stream into something abstract:

A "table" has a "table header" and a "table trailer", and between those has 0-N 
"tablerows"

A "tablerow" has a "tablerow header" and a "tablerow trailer", and between 
those, has 0-n "tablecells"

A "tablecell" has a "tablecell header" and a "tablecell trailer", and between 
those has element data

The decorator class invokes methods from the factory interface to get the value 
of, for instance, a "tablecell header".  At runtime I plug in either an HTML 
factory or an XML factory.  The HTML factory returns "<td>", while the XML 
factory would return "<datatag>".

Applying different styles is a matter of attaching parameters to widgets.  
These parameters are used in the various calls to the factory to provide the 
different widget elements.

And that's all there is to it <smile>.  Is it a lot of code?  Yeah, it can be.  
It all depends on what you're trying to do, and whether you have a good 
destination in mind.  My classes are far more involved than that, because the 
data classes have attributes which may in turn affect the display 
characteristics.  They're also designed from the ground up to support 
bidirectional communication with a persistence server on the AS/400.

It all depends on what you want to do.

Joe

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Stone, Brad V (TC)" <bvstone@taylorcorp.com>
Reply-To: JAVA400-L@midrange.com
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2001 12:35:22 -0600 

>This is mainly a question for Joe P., but if anyone else has any info, I'm
all ears.

A while ago we were talking about the differences between JSPs and CGI.  In
that discussion Joe P. brought up the fact that he could very easily switch
his output from HTML to XML.

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