Java Tip 140: Automatically generate JavaBeans from XSL files in J2EE applications

In the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) world, servlets complement applets on the server side and complete the definition of Java’s role in the client/server hierarchy and in multitiered applications. Nowadays, J2EE plays a prominent role in Java’s acceptance, and numerous “Java-completing” techniques exist like, XML, XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), and Java object-to-XML conversion. Many available resources can help you learn about servlets, XML/XSLT, and HTML (see Resources). Therefore, I do not discuss those techniques here, but focus on a problem that plays an important role in the everyday life of a Web application developer who uses such techniques: writing Java statements that extract parameter values delivered by HTML form elements and produce corresponding JavaBeans as intermediate data storage. These beans manage the data flow between an application client (browser) and components running on the J2EE server, or between server components and a database. They hold either the data the user entered in HTML forms or, more generally, any attribute passed either on the URL or in a POST. For instance, a bean for a login page could have two properties: login and password. During request handling, such a bean converts to an XML tree.

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