When Framework is Overkill
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Join For FreeRecently there have been some hot articles about frameworks: and Better Java Web Frameworks: ItsNat. Sometimes I've found that frameworks just make life harder. Recently I was assigned a job to create a company's site from scratch. The requirement is relatively simple, less than 10 static HTML pages, literally no server side processing.
I decided to write a simple mini "framework" to aid my client's designer, instead of adpoting an off-the-shelf web framework.
The idea is pretty much the same as most CMS: to keep a big template out and to only let the user (the maintanence designer) touch the content of the page. Yet, I want to provide flexibility to some degree. For example, at least I wanted to do some simple SEO to every page.
Template:
<html> <head> <title>{{title}}</title> <meta name="description" content="{{description}}" /> </head> <body> <div id="head"> ... ignored for simplicity... </div> <div id="content">{{body}}</div> <div id="footer">... </div> </body> </html>
And with the template, the actual page needs only to provide the information like TITLE, BODY, DESCRIPTION:
e.g., "about-us.html":
{{title}} About Us{{description}} what ever information that you want search engine know
{{body}} ... here is the real content, ignored for simplicity...
So I need a ServletFilter to intercept the request and to wrap the response from "about-us.html" and to make any necessary subsititutions. I search the default servlet's output for anything like {{ABC}} and use "String.replace" to try to replace/insert into the template string. Once all is done, I dump the result to the original response.
I have included my source code below. The BufferedServletOutputStream class is copy-and-pasted from a Google search result, sorry I couldn't find the author's name:
public class StaticSiteTemplate implements Filter { private Map defaultParameters = new HashMap(); private String template = ""; @Override public void init(FilterConfig filterConfig) throws ServletException { ... } @Override public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException { CapturedHttpResponseWrapper wrapper = new CapturedHttpResponseWrapper((HttpServletResponse) response); chain.doFilter(request, wrapper); // find tagString originalContent = wrapper.toString(); Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile( < a href = "file://%7b//%7B//w+//%7D//%7D" mce_href = "file://%7b//%7B//w+//%7D//%7D" >\\{\\{\\w +\\}\\}</a >); Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(originalContent); String result = template; if (matcher.find()) { ArrayList breakpointList = new ArrayList(); breakpointList.add(new TemplateBreakupPoint(matcher.group(), matcher.end(), originalContent.length())); while (matcher.find()) { breakpointList.get(breakpointList.size() - 1).end = matcher.start(); breakpointList.add(new TemplateBreakupPoint(matcher.group(), matcher.end(), originalContent.length())); } for (TemplateBreakupPoint tbp : breakpointList) { result = result.replace(tbp.key, originalContent.substring(tbp.start, tbp.end).trim()); } } else {// assume all belong to bodyresult = template.replace("{{body}}", originalContent);} // replace default params for (String key : defaultParameters.keySet()) { result = result.replace(key, defaultParameters.get(key)); } // dump outputbyte[] buffer = result.getBytes(response.getCharacterEncoding()); response.setContentLength(buffer.length); response.getOutputStream().write(buffer); } public void loadTemplate() throws IOException {...} ... }
You can view my site as a live demo of this approach here: http://www.nwhholdings.com
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