Programmatic HTMLDocument generation using Java

Question

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 1

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.

Answer 2

I'd look into how JSPs work - i.e., they compile down into a servlet that is basically one huge long set of StringBuffer appends. The tags also compile down into Java code snippets. This is messy, but very very fast, and you never see this code unless you delve into Tomcat's work directory. Maybe what you want is to actually code your HTML generation from a HTML centric view like a JSP, with added tags for loops, etc, and use a similar code generation engine and compiler internally within your project.

Alternatively, just deal with the StringBuilder yourself in a utility class that has methods for "openTag", "closeTag", "openTagWithAttributes", "startTable", and so on... it could use a Builder pattern, and your code would look like:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    TableBuilder t = new TableBuilder();
    t.start().border(3).cellpadding(4).cellspacing(0).width("70%")
      .startHead().style("font-weight: bold;")
        .newRow().style("border: 2px 0px solid grey;")
          .newHeaderCell().content("Header 1")
          .newHeaderCell().colspan(2).content("Header 2")
      .end()
      .startBody()
        .newRow()
          .newCell().content("One/One")
          .newCell().rowspan(2).content("One/Two")
          .newCell().content("One/Three")
        .newRow()
          .newCell().content("Two/One")
          .newCell().content("Two/Three")
      .end()
    .end();
    System.out.println(t.toHTML());
}