Using The IDRS To Generate Static Content

The Problem:
The IDRS web site needed a news section along with news to be displayed on the front page of the site. This news needs to be static for two reasons. The first is that SourceForge.net does not support Java(TM) servlets and the second is that the news needs to be indexed by search engines for visibility.

The tools:
IDRS 2.0 Alpha 4
Tomcat 4.0
MySQL 3.32.X

The Solution:
A web application was built using the IDRS that allowed for new news to be uploaded into a database as well as a table of story summaries and the full content of stories into separate HTML files that are stored in a specified directory. Here is a layout of the application:

The creation of the news involves several steps:

First the stories that will be part of the news must be selected. Also the directory where the news will be generated to, the path relative to the news articles to the page where the blurbs will be and the path relative to the page where the blurbs will be to where the stories will be stored.

Once this is done, the following screen appears:

This is the HTML source of the blurbs that will then be copied into the news page of the IDRS web site. The changes are then uploaded to the IDRS web site and act as part of the IDRS web site.

The IDRS provided several features that allowed for a quick creation of this application. One such feature was the ability to set properties of objects automatically. This allowed for the application's business logic to be written following the proven JavaBean format for greater maintainability and object-oriented compliance. Also the ability contain all of the business logic inside of Java classes also helps increase maintainability.

This application shows not only how the IDRS can be used to generate dynamic content, but also static content. The ability to encapsulate the business logic into JavaBeans and for quicker creation and greater maintainability.