Programmatic HTMLDocument generation using Java
Does anyone know how to generate an HTMLDocument object programmatically in Java without resorting to generating a String externally and then using HTMLEditorKit#read to parse it? Two reasons I ask:
Firstly my HTML generation routine needs to be very fast and I assume that parsing a string into an internal model is more costly than directly constructing this model.
Secondly, an object-oriented approach would likely result in cleaner code.
I should also mention that, for licensing reasons, I can't resort to using any libraries other than those shipped with the JVM.
Thanks, Tom
Answer
One object-oriented approach is to use a library called ECS.
It is quite simple library, and has not changed for ages. Then again, the HTML 4.01 spec has not changed either ;) I've used ECS and consider it far better than generating large HTML fragments with just Strings or StringBuffers/StringBuilders.
Small example:
Option optionElement = new Option();
optionElement.setTagText("bar");
optionElement.setValue("foo");
optionElement.setSelected(false);
optionElement.toString() would now yield:
<option value='foo'>bar</option>
The library supports both HTML 4.0 and XHTML. The only thing that initially bothered me a lot was that names of classes related to the XHTML version started with a lowercase letter: option, input, a, tr, and so on, which goes against the most basic Java conventions. But that's something you can get used to if you want to use XHTML; at least I did, surprisingly fast.