Java and XSLT

Another Servlet Example

In our next example, the servlet will utilize DOM and XSLT to create its web pages. This achieves our goal of separation between data and presentation, making it possible to fully customize the HTML output without making any changes to the Java code. Although an XML approach makes the code more complex for a small example program such as this, the benefits quickly outweigh the costs as web applications get more sophisticated. The same is true for an Enterprise JavaBeans approach. For a trivial program, the configuration requirements seem very complex; but as the application complexity increases, the benefits of a sophisticated architecture become obvious.

Our program will consist of two web pages, allowing visitors to enter personal information. The first page will prompt for their name, phone, and email, and the second page will display a summary of the data that was entered. The first page does validation, forcing the user to enter all of the required fields.

Design

The primary goal of this small application is to demonstrate how to use XSLT from a servlet. Specifically, JAXP will be used with DOM to create some dynamic XML data, then XSLT stylesheets will be used to transform that data into HTML. The design is presented in Figure 6-4.

Figure 6-4. Personal data design

As Figure 6-4 shows, PersonalDataServlet is a subclass of HttpServlet. This servlet overrides ...