Java and XSLT

Chapter 7. Discussion Forum

Up until now, the examples in this book have been short and to the point. The goal of this chapter is to show how a much more sophisticated web application is designed and implemented from the ground up. This is the culmination of everything covered so far, combining XML, servlets, XSLT, JDBC, JAXP, and JDOM into a fully functioning web-based discussion forum. As with the other examples in this book, the full source code is available from the companion web site.

Walking the line between “textbook quality” and “real-world” examples is difficult. First and foremost, the goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how to design and implement a nontrivial web application using XSLT and Java. The second goal is to produce a decent application that can actually be used in the real world. Hopefully this has been achieved. Although making an example of this size fit into a single chapter involves a few tradeoffs, the design is flexible enough to allow new features, such as user authentication, to be implemented without too much additional effort.

The discussion forum requires the following Java packages:

• Java 2 Standard Edition v1.2 or later

• JDOM beta 6

• Any JAXP 1.1 compatible XML parser and XSLT processor

• Any servlet container that supports Version 2.2 or later of the servlet specification

• Either MySQL or Microsoft Access

Overall Process

Developing a web application using Java and XSLT can be broken down into several key steps. As in any software development project, ...