Mixer 0.71

Mixer (source, doc, jar, everything) is a helper-class that is easy to use for Servlet programmers that enable a complete separation of Servlet- and HTML-code. Licence: GNU GPL.

Mixer does not use any new language and is very efficient. The template HTML-document is valid HTML that has two types of markers. Context-markers are markers, in the form of a HTML-comment, that are placed around parts of HTML-code that should be repeated:

<!--===xxx===-->
<tr>
  <td>
    ===name===
  </td>
  <td>
    <a href="mailto:===email===">===email===</a>
  </td>
</tr>
<!--===xxx===-->

Variable-markers are markers that should be substituted for values:

<p>
  My name is ===name=== and my email is <a href="mailto:===email===">===email===</a>.
</p>

For efficiency use Mixer in a Servlet like this:

Define a class-variable that holds a template HTML-document:

private static String htmlTemplate = null;

In method init, load content from a template HTML-file into this class-variable:

if (htmlTemplate == null) {
   htmlTemplate = Mixer.getContent(new File(getServletContext().getRealPath("x.html")));
}

In metod doGet and/or doPost:

Mixer m = new Mixer(htmlTemplate);
m.add("===email===", "pierre@dsv.su.se");
...
response.setContentType("text/html");
PrintWriter pw = response.getWriter();
pw.println(m.getMix());

Accordingly, costly file operations only take place during initialization of the Servlet. 

Mixer also adds functionality to mix different parts of different HTML-documents. This is done by preloading any number of template HTML-documents in the init-method and then selecting different parts of the template HTML-documents to build a new HTML-document. The resulting document can in turn be used as a template for further processing.

Please report bugs here.

Updated 2004-06-12 by Pierre A. I. Wijkman.