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Serving Up WAP with Enhydra
by Marc Robards
The configuration instructions used in this article and much of the information on building
WAP applications with Enhydra were compiled by Satish S. of Lateral Software Technology. Satish's
contributions to the Enhydra project also include his excellent WAP@Enhydra paper located at
http://www.enhydra.org/software/documentation/enhydra/WAP@Enhydra.rtf.
Satish can be reached via email at DrSatish@Bigfoot.com.
Introduction
If you haven't checked out
Enhydra, Lutris Technologies' open-source Java application server for your
web-based application needs, you don't know what you're missing. With
version 3.0, Enhydra's cup overflows with features like Servlets 2.2, JSP 1.1,
XMLC, cookie-less sessions, and of particular interest to the visitors of this
site, a fully functional WML DTD. Yes, that means you can write your entire WAP
application with complete dynamic functionality in 100% Java! (Well, WML
and Java Servlets to be exact, but you get the point.) What Enhydra does for
you is provide a framework for servlet-based web applications, with plenty of
built in tools for database access, XML parsing, on-the-fly HTML compilation, and
even IDE integration. We'll focus on the WAP functionality of Enhydra for this
article, walk through how to set up Enhydra on a development machine, write
a simple multi-card WAP application, and have Enhydra serve it up with it's own
multiserver, with no additional web server required!
Enhydra Overview
Enhydra's framework is basically set up like this: It starts with HTML (or WML)
documents, modified with an extra ID property in the tags you want to be
dynamic (SPANs for dynamic text, TR and TDs for dynamically generated tables, etc.).
Enhydra then uses its supplied XMLC program to parse and compile the pages into
properly formatted XMLC classes. Then you create corresponding Java classes
for each HTML page you want to show, which loads up the XMLC classes, does
whatever dynamic stuff you tell it to do, and with a call to the function to serve
up the page...presto! Enhydra presents the page as [page name].po in the browser,
which stands for Presentation Object. To the user, it looks just like standard
HTML (or WML). That was the fifty cent tour of Enhydra, if you want to get into
the nitty gritty, check out the documentation or join the Enhydra mailing list.
It's really a powerful application framework, and scalable enough for any size job.
Now let's walk through setting up Enhydra on your box and configuring it to serve
up some WML.
Next: Enhydra Mini-HOWTO
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