I'm working on learning JSP and the Play framework, and I understand that it runs on Scala and renders views based on templates, but what if I just want to use plain HTML rather than scala templates?
The situation I'm in is that I'm designing the site to match a visual template, so I'm using Dreamweaver to build the html files. I really like Play framework though, so I'd like to continue using it. So, what are my options here?
I don't get. Play's views are not just nice html files, of course you can (or even should) use your favorite tools for design part, anyway you have to also learn how to include a dynamic parts in it.
Of course you can use DreamWeaver for that task as it has feature for editing source code. But I can ensure you from my own experience, that there are better tools for every-day work with Play's views than DW.
You can also use plain HTML in your /public folder however in this scenario you won't be able to make it dynamic, so it has no sense, as you can create the pages without any framework - just using static files created with DW.
In general words: you need to verify your needs, cause from your question I read: "I like Play framework, anyway I don't want to use it for its job..."
After-comments edit:
You don't have to make views dynamic. If you won't pass any arguments into the view and will put there pure HTML it will be 'relatively cheap' way for displaying static pages as well. Just you need to remeber to leave first line of the file empty. So you don't need to use File index = new File... instead just put your bare HTML code into ie: app/views/staticContact.scala.html and then use an action:
public static Result staticContact(){
return ok(views.html.staticContact.render());
}
On the quite other hand, last time I was wondering if it wasn't better to put HTML code of the static pages into the DB, in such case you could create an editing page, where you could change HTML without redeploying the application. All what you will need it was just fetching HTML from DB and displaying it in one generic view. For better performance you can use included Cache implementation.
GET / controllers.Assets.at(path="/public/html", file="index.html")
This is working for play 2.0.1 for /public/html/index.html file
Related
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.
I'm just starting out with Spring MVC having been trying to pickup Java(Web) for the few months.
I'm sure what I'm trying to achieve is very simply, but I can't find a solution that really works.
I'd like to include another controller/view inside a view. This could be a menu, or some other dynamically generated content. For example, let's say in a side bar of an application I need to display a list of categories. I don't want to have to retrieve these categories in every controller/view that needs to use them. I'd like to include another controller/view into the main page view so that this content can be placed in multiple views but managed by a single piece of code.
ASP.NET MVC has something called PartialViews, and most PHP frameworks seem to offer this kind of functionality, but I can't find anything like this in spring.
The closest I've come to resolving this issue is to use the jsp:include tag, which does work, infact it's almost the solution, but it generates errors in Eclipse because obviously Eclipse can't locate the path, as it's a spring RequestMapping i.e. /include/categories rather than a direct link to a physical file.
The other solution is to use Javascript to dynamically load content into the sidebar, but I don't want to do that.
Is there a 'correct' way to do this, or is there a way to supress the errors generated by eclipse for the jsp:include tag?
If the content your are including is static and you don't have a lot of different pages, your approach with including jsps is ok. Otherewise, look at the templating frameworks like Tiles or Thymeleaf.
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.
I have a web page with lots of text.Is there any means through which I can translate it,without using resource bundle(which involves using properties files,requiring key value pairs for all words.)?
Thanks for your precious time.
An alternative is to create separate views for each language. So a "mypage_en_US.html" for the US-english version and a "mypage_en_GB.html" for the british-english version. This gives you total control over the text and layout but has the drawback of possible code duplication if there is any logic in your view.
Wicket uses pretty clean views which should hardly contain any logic so this works pretty well there.
Just be innovative here. If you are getting shitty copy pase work. Write a program to convert the properties file and then use that properties file using google translate api, but yeah end of the day you will have to go with properties file.
I belive there would be other way too using google translate api again, would love to hear that myself too
Depends on your web framework.
For example, Wicket can apply I18N on webpages in two ways :
- using I18N files and resourcesbundles, with placeholders where required in the page
- by having totally separate pages, one for each language. The page template itself is postfixed with the locale, much like property files : HomePage_en.html, HomePage_fr.html, etc.
Other web frameworks may have similar features. If you're using raw JSP/Servlets, I'm afraid you're pretty much on your own.
But it's totally possible to implement your own templating system. For example, you could use a set of Freemarker templates, and load the one that matches the desired locale.
I have a project where they want me to embed a website into a java application and they want the website to have a similar color scheme as the rest of the application. I know a lot about CSS and building websites but I am not aware of a way to change the look of a website as it comes in on the fly. Is there someone who can help?
Update:
I don't have access to the header because it is not my website. To give more info about the project is we have a browser embedded in a java client application. The user needs to access a website that displays the contents of a database. I have no access to the original html or css from the site.
What i need is to change the background color and font sizes of the incoming webpage to match the look and feel of the java application.
One approach would be to replace their CSS with your own.
You could also take the approach used by the Stylish plugin, which involves a lot !important decelerations to override the site's CSS. Since this is a Java app, I assume the user will not have opportunity to supply their own CSS, so using !important here doesn't precisely go against the standard.
In your particular situation, I'd look into data scraping, all you need to do is scrape the website for the data, and then re-style it to present it how you want.
Good luck
The Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox does just this. You can write a bit of Javascript code and have it run when certain web pages load. One common thing to use it for is to make changes to the DOM to move page elements around, hide or resize elements, change colors, etc. There are a bunch of examples at userscripts.org if you want to get an idea of what I am talking about.
Your code would simply need to do something similar. Load the page (including the normal style sheets) and then use the DOM to make changes to style elements as desired. Browse through the source of the page to get the names/ids of important elements, and your code can key off of those. Loading an additional CSS file containing your changes is an option, but doing it programmatically will likely give you more flexibility in the event that the target website changes.
Depends on what do you use to show the pages in Java. Most browser implementations support dynamic changes to the DOM, so you can simply add a CSS file to header as a last element, and it will be applied.
you need to know the markup of the html / css so you can make the best skin.
you could theoretically do it by styling just the basic tags: h1...h6, p, etc... but it would not be as good and would probably fail to produce the best results at times and even produce horrible things at times.
if you KNOW the site markup then you can make a skin and simply use CSS/images to skin it as you wanted it.
just include your CSS markup LAST so that it overrides the one already present on the site that you want to skin differently.
should not be a difficult thing per se. the skin itself is probably the better (more effort required) part of the job.
On the fly, should mean changing the html fetched. So parsing and replacing tokens seems to be a/the way.
You could change the locations of the style sheet files by replacing the href value in a link that points to a css file, and set the value to your style sheet (a different URI).
<link type="text/css" href="mylocalURI" rel="stylesheet />
(this should be the result of a process/replacement)
I think you understand what should happend for inline styles.
I would use JTidy to normalize the original site HTML to XHTML, then use XSLT to filter only the interesting/relevant information, obtaining XML format; and finally (since I wouln't want to convert XML to objects), XSLT again to transform the "pure" XML into the HTML look & feel I need/want.
All of this can be assembled as streams, using more or less 4 Kb of buffer per filter (12 Kb total) per thread. Also meaning that it will run fast enough. And all built on standard, open-source available components.
Cheers.