Mailing-List: contact cocoon-dev-help@xml.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 16:24:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Donald Ball <balld@webslingerZ.com>
To: general@xml.apache.org
cc: Cocoon <cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org>, msergeant@ndirect.co.uk,
        ac.quick@sympatico.ca
Subject: [announce] XMLForm - a new project using Xerces, Xalan, & JTidy
Message-ID: 
 <Pine.LNX.4.10.10002211554580.30005-100000@phoenix.webslingerZ.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I've been using cocoon for time out of mind to handle sending information
out of my XML files as HTML over HTTP and it's fantastic. That's half of
the work of a typical web design shop. The other half of the equation
hasn't really been addressed to my satisfaction yet - I wanted a way to
edit XML files through an HTML form interface. Poking around in the perl
world (which is ahead of us in some areas, but oddly behind in others) I
found the CGI::XMLForm module which lets you create XML documents from
HTTP requests by interpreting the variable names as XPath-like
expressions. It's nice, but it's in perl, which is not my language of
choice, and I had some things I wanted to add to it.

I reimplemented most of it as a Java servlet using Xerces and Xalan to do
the heavy lifting. I went two steps further, adding support for
interpreting variable values as XML or HTML (thanks to JTidy), and adding
the ability to insert the newly created XML fragment into an existing XML
document at a point specified by an XPath expression.

I've got easily a dozen ideas for things I might like to do to it, but
it's usable now and I thought I'd see if others might be interested in
playing with it. It's available here:

http://www.webslingerZ.com/balld/xmlform/

If you find this servlet useful, if you have any suggestions, or if you
know of a similar project in Java that escaped my attention, please don't
hesitate to contact me.

- donald