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Create an XML Web Application with Struts, Xerces, and Xalan

by Alexander Prohorenko and Olexiy Prohorenko

Despite XML's ubiquity, it's not always obvious how to use it in a Web application—or why you would want to in the first place. This article answers both questions, explaining why and how to build a simple XML-oriented Web applicationIt will help for you to already be familiar with XML, Java's XML API, and of course, with creating of J2EE Web applications using the Jakarta Struts framework. However, even if you're not proficient with the above-mentioned tools, this article can certainly serve as your starting point.

What You Will Need

For your Web container, you can use any J2EE compliant server—this article uses JBoss 3.2.6. To build the Web application, use the open source framework Jakarta Struts 1.2.4. For XML/XSLT processing, you'll need Apache Xalan 2.6.0, which is an XSLT processor for transforming XML documents into HTML, text, or other XML document types. To create XML documents, you'll need Apache Xerces2, but you do not need to download and install it separately, since it's included in Xalan's package. To compile, pack, and deploy, you'll need the Apache Ant 1.6.2 build tool.

Why XML/XSLT?

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the universal syntax for describing and structuring data independent from application logic. It's a cross-platform, extensible, and text-based standard for representing data.

XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is the language used for translating XML documents to different formats.

Suppose your Web site requires numerous, dynamically-changeable design themes? Or sayyour site needs supportnot only the usual browsers, but also for PDAs/handheld clients? Or, you need to provide third-parties with the ability to export information from the site?

You can see why XML with XSLT provide good solutions for these tasks. And that's disregarding the issue of separating presentation logic from business logic, which becomes very important when you are working in a team, where Web designers need to change all HTML/CSS templates design frequently.

You simply force each of your pages to output XML, and apply the necessary XSLT stylesheet template. You can have any number of these XSLT templates and simply choose which one to apply. No change to any of your business or application logic.

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