Develop Reference

making a browser without using JTextPane or any other class that reads HTML

Good evening, I'm working on a project with a team, we have to make a browser without using JEditorPane or any other class that reads HTML.
How can we do that? Do we need to make a new class that does what JEditorPane does? Can I find somewhere JEditorPane's code? Thanks!

Well, this is an answer:
If you need to display web content without using any pre-existing engine (such JEditorPanel or a ChromeBind), you need to read the HTML as a XML file and construct your native View based on it (without CSS and JS this is a fairly easy task) by constructing the screen based on a one-to-one equivalent of a HTML tag to a Java JComponent.

Modern Web Browsers are pretty complicated, so there are a lot of different pieces that come together to display a web page. In order to build a browser, you need to first understand what a browser is. For that, I recommend reading this tutorial.
Once you have an understanding of how a browser actually works you need to determine which pieces you can reuse and which pieces you have to write from scratch. Do you have to write the entire rendering engine? Good luck! Can you use an existing engine like Gecko or Webkit? Or maybe you can get a little closer to done and use the java port of Webkit?
Once you have a better understanding of the question come back and ask more direct questions when you get stuck at a specific piece. As it is, your first step is to gain an understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

Web UI for existing Java application

I am trying to build a search engine using java and the lucene API as part of a project. For the last step, we plan to build a web UI (a local host would do) for the same. Are there UI softwares/plugins for eclipse which will allow me to call the functions present in the java classes?
Essentially I would want to have a search box and a search key, pressing which will throw up the search results(which is computed from the java program). javascript cannot call java code I understand. So using that is eliminated?
Any suggestions on what to use will be greatly appreciated. I have pretty poor knowledge in front end design!
Cheers!
AB

If all you have is a simple screen with a entry field and a button and you simply want to return an html table. I would go with a servlet and two jsps. Your servlet can call your search engine and then have the jsp format the data into the table. If you do not know web apis this is probably the easiest entry.

I think, If your using JAVA, that you should look into JSF.
It's a rather easy to maintain and work with library for just the uses you describe.
I recommend these tutorials to get you started: http://www.coreservlets.com/JSF-Tutorial/jsf2/#Tutorial-Intro

There are lots of options to achieve this.
you can create web-ui using jsp.
I have also created same type of project using Lucene, here i have used spring mvc.i have provided all the back-end process as REST api which any web-ui can use.

Please do not look into JSF; it is an overengineered pile for your task.
Sure you can call your java code from javascript, you can make it really simple with something like DWR.
However, for your project I would suggest GWT as then you only deal with Java and it will generate javascript, html and css for you.
For your project you dont really need an "enterprise" level framework like spring or a fullstack JavaEE, you could keep it real oldschool with only JSPs and html/javascript. However thats a bit too flaky for my taste, so go with GWT.
With GWT you basically set it up, define your module, entrance point (look at the hello world), and then you add a layout to your page like something to place the searchbox into and the resultbox to. Then you call your other Java code and classes from there like you normally would.

I would suggest you to use GWT in your application because GWT enables you to call java methods and it will also convert Javascript and css for your Java modules after GWT compile.
GWT reference :- http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/gettingstarted.html

If you're going to use GWT, you could aslo check Vaadin.
Creating a search UI is really simple, and the tutorial show a criteria /result table application taht could be adapted.

Is it possible to use flashvars with JBoss?

I'm part of a team developing a product using JSF 2.0 and I was asked to investigate the possibility of including FusionCharts free in the app. I have tried different ways of inserting a simple chart in a JSF page but with no luck.
On of the methods involves using the elements OBJECT and EMBED but hhen I try to use them I get a "null source" error from JBoss. From what I could find online (through Google), I am under the impression that 'flashvars' isn't quite compatible with JBoss. Is anyone here able to confirm this? If this is the case, what workaround would you suggest me?
Other ways I also found online didn't show the chart not even an error message.
Thanks in advance.

It is hard to tell what the other methods quoted were, but the preferred way of embedding flash is to use swfobject, a javascript library that does not require any special tags (nor server-side support).
It boils down to preparing a div for your flash content, giving it an id, and then calling a single function that takes the swf file url, size of the clip, flasvars and so. The javascript could easily contain EL expressions.
You might want to read this:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swfobject.html
but skip to the Under the hood: dynamic publishing section, you will not be using the static publishing nor GUI.

The probable solution might be to pass the value of the flashvars as querystring of the user loading the chart swf file.
e.g.,
Column3D.swf?debugMode=1&dataURL=mydata.xml&registerWithJS=1&chartWidth=200&chartHeight=300

Generating and visualising a decision tree

I wonder if anyone is able to help or advise with the following; I have to be able to take data from a data source and to be able to visualise that data as a decision trees on a web page all. This will be a single process which is seamless to an end user.
This will be done using JSPs and Java servlets but what concerns me are the underlying products. I'm thinking of passing the data to a Weka classifier and then doing something with the .dot file it creates, i.e. maybe feeding it to GraphViz or trying to use the Google Visualization API to present an interactive display.
But, can anyone tell me if this is a viable approach or suggest alternatives?
Thanks
Martin O'Shea.

I've had a lot of success creating data flow graphs with graphviz (I uploaded them with a script to a MoinMoin wiki and used the graphviz plugin). That plugin even allowed to have links in the graphs, so we could keep the individual graphs small.

For the UI we have added the JS stuff from http://www.mxgraph.com/ to display larger graphs to the user.
Your approach is viable however. GraphViz is a good tool.

autogenerate HTTP screen scraping Java code

I need to screen scrape some data from a website, because it isn't available via their web service. When I've needed to do this previously, I've written the Java code myself using Apache's HTTP client library to make the relevant HTTP calls to download the data. I figured out the relevant calls I needed to make by clicking through the relevant screens in a browser while using the Charles web proxy to log the corresponding HTTP calls.
As you can imagine this is a fairly tedious process, and I'm wodering if there's a tool that can actually generate the Java code that corresponds to a browser session. I expect the generated code wouldn't be as pretty as code written manually, but I could always tidy it up afterwards. Does anyone know if such a tool exists? Selenium is one possibility I'm aware of, though I'm not sure if it supports this exact use case.
Thanks,
Don

I would also add +1 for HtmlUnit since its functionality is very powerful: if you are needing behaviour 'as though a real browser was scraping and using the page' that's definitely the best option available. HtmlUnit executes (if you want it to) the Javascript in the page.
It currently has full featured support for all the main Javascript libraries and will execute JS code using them. Corresponding with that you can get handles to the Javascript objects in page programmatically within your test.
If however the scope of what you are trying to do is less, more along the lines of reading some of the HTML elements and where you dont much care about Javascript, then using NekoHTML should suffice. Its similar to JDom giving programmatic - rather than XPath - access to the tree. You would probably need to use Apache's HttpClient to retrieve pages.

The manageability.org blog has an entry which lists a whole bunch of web page scraping tools for Java. However, I do not seem to be able to reach it right now, but I did find a text only representation in Google's cache here.

You should take a look at HtmlUnit - it was designed for testing websites but works great for screen scraping and navigating through multiple pages. It takes care of cookies and other session-related stuff.

I would say I personally like to use HtmlUnit and Selenium as my 2 favorite tools for Screen Scraping.

A tool called The Grinder allows you to script a session to a site by going through its proxy. The output is Python (runnable in Jython).