Product Description
Taking a task view wherever possible, this book is written to support those seeking a more elegant, maintainable, and flexible mechanism for building Web application presentations. While we spend some time introducing the Enhydra application server for those who are new to the topic of application server development, this book is focused primarily on the topic of Enhydra XMLC and how to use it to improve the lifecycle requirements of your Web application.
A modest knowledge of the Java language is assumed, but key supporting topics, such as XML and DOM development, are introduced for those who are new to them. There is even a chapter dedicated to thinking out the requirements of an application based on an application service-provided (ASP) model. For those who are already well-versed in presentation frameworks, a technical overview of XMLC with other presentation technologies is provided. For those who are curious about Enhydra XMLC and Enhydra in general, we've presented sufficient information to appreciate its value and unique approach to building dynamic, Web-based presentations for browsers, mobile devices, and even good old telephones when taking advantage of freely available voice portal services from TellMe or Voxeo. More importantly, it is also written to demonstrate how to build Web applications and some of the strategies you could employ.
We’ve also used this opportunity to explain and compare supporting concepts such as XML and HTML, explaining their historical differences as well as their basic reasons for being. The use of a pronounced demonstration application modeled after a conference showfloor that you'd encounter at any major computer show is targeted at the reader who is just embarking on the topic of building Web applications. It's used as a means for exploring the process of how you might integrate different display devices into the overall application.
Enhydra definitely carries a Unix flavor, although the Enhydra Kelp project has done a lot to integrate Enhydra with popular Windows Interactive Design Environments, such as JBuilder and Forte. In order to focus more on the xmlc command itself, we have chosen to use RedHat's Cygwin tools to emulate a Unix command line environment for the Windows environment.
From the Author
About six years ago, November 1995, I came to Lutris, then "The Information Refinery," to leading training and marketing, later to become President, and after replacing myself with a real President, Yancy Lind, have served as Chief Evangelist for the past three years.
One of the keys to establishing and perpetuating a successful open source project is to seed that project with a great technology.
One way to approach a new product is to sit in a room and think of great architectures, talking to a few customers, then toss a coin. Another is to simply hire great developers, who happen to be great people, and trust their experience and sense of commitment. Then do major consulting work, and find out "the truth" from those who will eventually reflect your customer.
It started with a hard-nosed and very, very creative architect, Lutris CTO Paul Morgan, acknowledging the need for a pure, highly adaptive architecture to support our consulting business. We did something very good[md]hiring solid software engineers. People who appreciated testing, version control systems, and elegant designs. We lucked out. Under the umbrella of an evolving consulting business, Paul Morgan, Mark Diekhans, John Marco, Andy John, Kyle Clark, and Shawn McMurdo applied their UNIX server and networking backgrounds together to lay the foundation for a highly extensible, pragmatic architecture that started with a simple but elegant way to lay out source code.
