Suppose I have a bunch of (very simple) HTML pages, that I want to apply a common 'theme".
These files are downloaded using various Groovy scripts, and I would like to apply to them this styling during a maven build. How could I do that ?
Using which framework/library could I do that ?
Furthermore notice I want to do that in a static fashion, that's to say I want to have the following process to occur
Files are downloaded by Groovy scripts
They are processed (in a "magical" fashion) by this library
They may be sent by FTP/SCP to an hosting server
Do you know such an easy to use library ?
Depends on the details of the task but having in mind the steps you've described you can consider using velocity templates.
I would suggest using sitemesh decorator. I am a user of old version but a new release is being worked on that allows you to do exactly what you are asking for. Do a google search on sitemesh and you should find lots of examples.
In a nutshell sitemesh decoration: basic html + template = decorated page.
Related
I am writing a new service Convert-HTML-TO-PDF. But now I am confused that what way should I prefer.
What ways I have to implement:
Use Head-less browser and capture the HTML page and convert to PDF
Use Java/Node Lib to convert. Which will create HTML relevant component in PDF file and then render?
Now, please help me to understand what will be the best way to implement a service and why!
[update]
And what will be the advantages and disadvantages of each approach
In my view, the best way forward always depends on what you already have experience with and what approach you take. There is no right or wrong here, everyone has to decide that for themselves based on their preferences.
Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Some of them are:
Headless Browser:
Advantage:
No large Libs necessary, therefore very memory saving
Disadvantage
the desired browser must be installed on the computer/server
rendering may differ for different browsers
Library:
Advantage:
different libraries available
for the popular libs there is a good documentation and code examples
Disadvantage
When upgrading to a newer version, code usually needs to be adapted.
When upgrading to a newer version, the result may look different.
In my projects I use a headless chrome browser. For this I found an easy to use api on Github, which uses the DevTools of Chrome.
It also includes a simple example how to print a page into a PDF.
For my purposes I have customized this example and write the HTML into a temporary file and then navigate to that file.
// Navigate to HTML-File
page.navigate(htmlTempFile.getAbsolutePath());
I can't say if this is the best way, but for me this was the easiest and most understandable way
I'm looking for a pure Java CSS spriting library that I can integrate into my Maven build, so that spriting would be done automatically for every new build. (I'm currently using http://code.google.com/p/wro4j/ for JavaScript and CSS minimizing)
I was looking into http://csssprites.org/ first but the CSS annotation effort required somewhat put me off. Is there any other library out there I should be looking at?
Although not 100% ideal, I went for SmartSprites in the end. There's a nice Jangaroo Maven Plugin, meaning you can integrate the Sprite generation into your Maven build process easily.
Downside of this solution is, that you have to add quite a bit of extra hints into your CSS files, so SmartSprites can do its spriting. Would have been nice, if SmartSprites would (semantically) parse the CSS files and do the spriting automatically.
I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for. This can create sprite sheets and export the data in many different formats. I posted to it because it has a command line version of it that may be of use.
http://www.texturepacker.com
http://www.texturepacker.com/store/
My target is to assemble a static web site that has a lot of repeating code. Now, I could use JSP includes for that purpose. But the site will be modified infrequently and under very heavy load, also using features like gzip and I don't need the complications.
My idea is to put up a build process with some tool like ant, That build process will concatenate all HTML pieces, preprocess HTML, JS, CSS with minifier and finally apply gzip.
I want an XML configuration that will define the parts that need to go in every html page and their order.
I need advice on ant or any similar tool; how to approach the configuration, any external tools that will help? Any suggestions are much appreciated.
XSLT is perfectly suited to transform XML into another format like HTML.
You can download Apache Xalan to give it a try. Ant has support for XSLT processing.
In the java world, you can take a look at Apache Forrest, which precisely do that kind of things.
In other worlds, there also exist webgen, which is a competent Ruby site builder.
I also vaguey remember there are other alternatives, but i can't find back their name.
I wanted to use JET (Java Emitter Templates)
in my Netbeans projects, but had to find out that JET
heavily depends on Eclipse libraries.
Is there something similar to JET, but as a standalone project?
Something which is open source and well maintained?
Futhermore, is "code generation" the common term for such tools?
If you are using Maven, you can use JET templates with the maven-jet-plugin.
This seems to be the source code. And here the documentation.
It is not actively maintained but works pretty well and follows the JET spec.
I've used it with templates and skeletons.
It's self contained, doesn't depend on Eclipse, and doesn't introduce any transitive dependencies to your project.
Indeed JET is very tied with Eclipse.
If you want to generate code without Eclipse you should use another solution.
You can choose another template engine like Velocity (https://velocity.apache.org/) or FreeMarker (https://freemarker.apache.org/).
Or you can choose a code generator working by itself independently of any IDE.
For example "Telosys Command Line Interface" : http://www.telosys.org/
From what I know, JET is something like JSP, no?
Java Emitter Templates are very similar to Java Server Pages (JSPs). Both JETs and JSPs use the same syntax, and are compiled to Java behind the scenes. Both are used to separate the responsibility for rendering pages from the model and controller. Both accept objects passed into them as an input argument, both allow inserting string values within code ("expressions"), and allow direct use of Java code to perform loops, declare variable, or perform logical flows ("scriptlets"). Both are good ways of representing the structure of a generated object (web page, Java class, or file) while supporting customization of the details.
JETs differ from JSPs in a few key ways. In a JET, the structure of the markup may be changed to support generating code in different languages. Typically the input to a JET will be a configuration file and not user input (though there is nothing forbidding this). And also typically, JET processing will take place only once for a given workflow. These are not technical limitations, and you may find uses for JETs which are quite different...
ibm.com
Here are a few links to get you started on JSP, if that sounds like what you need:
sun.com
netbeans.org
Look for "template engine" for these types of tools.
A couple you might want to look at:
Apache Velocity (http://velocity.apache.org/)
StringTemplate (http://stringtemplate.org/)
I ended up using ERB (Ruby's template engine).
Works great in Netbeans!
I define custom ant task which generates source files by calling ERB (whose results are placed inside a non-versioned special directory).
The ant task is overriding Netbeans' "-pre-compile" task.
For C#, I have often used CodeSmith and lately the T4 generator which is part of Visual Studio.
I'm looking for something similar for Java, in particular an Eclipse add-in since I do all my Java development using the Eclipse IDE.
I've found that freemarker does a pretty good job for generating any type of code. From the website:
FreeMarker is a "template engine"; a generic tool to generate text output (anything from HTML to autogenerated source code) based on templates. It's a Java package, a class library for Java programmers. It's not an application for end-users in itself, but something that programmers can embed into their products.
It is used by struts2 a lot. The website has a long list of other products that use freemarker.
I have worked with both Velocity and StringTemplate. Velocity is a bit more conventional (think JSP/ASP concepts), while StringTemplate seems a bit cleaner. in a sense described in this Artima interview. Both are pure templating engines, and will require you to write some code around them, if you want to do full-blown code generation from a model.
StringTemplate is used internally by ANTLR, which may be useful to your effort.
As an alternative approach, you could go with Eclipse, using EMF and JET.
You should try Telosys Tools, an Eclipse plugin for code generation working from an existing database with customizable Velocity templates
See: http://www.telosys.org/
Eclipse Marketplace : http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/telosys-tools
The tutorials are here : https://sites.google.com/site/telosystutorial/
See this other question about CodeSmith : Is there any freeware tool available which is like Codesmith?
I use JavaForger to generate code from templates. It parses existing classes so that you can use that class-data inside your templates. It can both create new classes or insert code into existing classes. You can determine where generated code will be inserted based on a string conversion rule (e.g. myProject/dao/ProductDao.java => myProject/service/ProductService.java).
JavaForger is open source and uses FreeMarker as template engine and JavaParser as parser.
This is an old question but the only thing that comes close (for Java) to do what CodeSmith Generator does is Spring Roo.
The reason is that Java does not have Partial Classes like C# does. Spring Roo gets around this by using AspectJ ITDs.
My answer is to use StringTemplate, but there is a bit more to it than just what tool to use.
Is it the issue to generate java code? Or is it to use java tools? Programmers would be normally very comfortable writing code. Therefore, it would not be a leap to write some java classes and write a walk that would generate code using StringTemplate. I personally think it is a good exercise to create example models, generate your java code from the models. And depending on your use case you could end up writing JSON models by hand and never having to write any java code to produce the java code. Or you could end up writing Java classes that produce equivalent models.
You could use the StringTemplate based STST, which reads JSON. STST is command line based, and I am sure you could hook it to both eclipse and/or Visual Studio.
I personally think about portability, JSON is an extremely simple language. And almost every language has libraries that support it.
I'm not a C# man so I don't know what the equivalents would be, however I've found xdoclet to be very good in the past. I don't think it integrates with eclipse as such but you can run it from an ant script. Does things like generating Hibernate mapping files from annotated Java classes. Useful if that's what you're looking for :)
eclipse has a built-in template system.
look in window -> preferences -> java -> code style -> code templates
You might look at my plugin : http://fast-code.sourceforge.net/. It allows one to select multiple fields and generate code using user specified velocity templates.
Take a look at my project https://github.com/karajdaar/templator and see if that helps.
I wrote a simple web based application for my use.
its available at https://github.com/harish2704/templates
and a demo is available at http://templates-harish2704.rhcloud.com/
Its language independent tool. GUI supports several languages ( highlighting, snippet completion ect )