Quoting Robert Young ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
> before i go running to *The Boss*, is it accurate to say that webmacro
> provides similar/equivalent/superior functionality to WebLogic's
> htmlKona?? (all i know about htmlKona is what's in the Hunter book.
> BEA seems to have stopped offering it as a discrete product)
>
> thanx,
> robert young
It might be accurate to say that it provides equivalent functionality, and
whether it is superior is no doubt a matter of taste, but it isn't true
that it's similar.
htmlKona expects you to programatically build up your HTML document by
associating objects with HTML classes. It's a good language if you think
that you are embedding dynamic objects into a website--which is also a
programmers perspective.
WebMacro is a template system. Rather than programatically building up
HTML you directly write an HTML template. In this template you put
references to properties of objects, lists of objects, and so forth.
Then as programmer you populate a hashtable with all the objects that
are required to satisfy the references in the template text. Executing
the template "fills in the blanks" so to speak.
So they are equivalent in that both are methods of generating HTML, but
they differ substantially in worldview. So much so that it's likely that
they're not competitors--in some projects it will make more sense to view
a webpage as programatically generated from embedded objects (kona worldview)
and for others it makes more sense to view a webpage as something generated
by a web designer which includes data from a business model (WebMacro
worldview).
There are actually several other template systems besides WebMacro. What
differentiates WebMacro is that the business objects you deposit in the
template do not have to adhere to any particular interface. Instead,
WebMacro analyzes the classes in your program to work out how to
extract a "Name" from "Customer" (it expects your objects to be bean
like and figures out to call Customer.getName() when it sees $cust.Name).
Check out the website for more details:
http://webmacro.org
One other thing worth mentioning is that WebMacro is a framework and a
tool. It is not exclusive--you can use WebMacro and other HTML generating
techniques together in the same servlet.
Another thing worth mentioning is that WebMacro is free software.
Justin
> On Tuesday, November 02, 1999 3:45 PM, Justin Wells [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> > Use a template tool such as WebMacro. It allows you to keep the HTML
> > separate from your template. You build up your output data in a hashtable
> > and pass that to the template when you execute it.
> >
> > WebMacro takes care of figuring out how to extract the data you need from
> > the objects in the hashtable, providing you follow the beans spec.
> >
> > http://webmacro.org
> >
> > WebMacro was recently rated the 3rd best product of 1999 in the servlet
> > category by the Java Report. It's also free.
> >
> > Justin
>
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