14.10. Integrating Struts and XSLT
Problem
You want to use XSL transformations for HTML page generation instead of JSP pages in your Struts application.
Solution
Use the STXX framework with Struts.
Discussion
The Struts for Transforming XML with XSL (STXX) framework was
developed by Don Brown. (The STXX project site can be found at
http://stxx.sourceforge.net
.) STXX fits into Struts in a manner
similar to Velocity. Instead of forwarding requests to JSP pages,
your action forwards to a special URL that is processed by the
StxxRequestProcessor
. Based on request data, this
custom request processor reads a configuration file to determine the
corresponding XSLT stylesheet. The request processor then uses an
XSLT transformation engine to transform the received XML data, using
the XSLT stylesheet, into XHTML.
Tip
XHTML is HTML that is well-formed, valid XML. XHTML is specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); details can be found at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/.
To get started, download STXX from the project web site (http://stxx.sourceforge.net). This recipe was built using the full download of STXX Version 1.3. Extract the download to your system.
Copy the following JAR files to your application's WEB-INF/lib directory:
dist/stxx-1.3.jar
libs/core/jdom.jar
libs/xform/commons-jxpath-1.1.jar
libs/xform/xmlform.jar
The configuration of STXX is specified in the stxx.properties file. For this recipe, you can use this file without modification. From the STXX directory, copy source/web/WEB-INF/classes/stxx.properties ...
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