Adelene Ng

This article demonstrates how we can integrate XSL-FO, XSLT, and JavaMail into our existing web-based applications. I show you how we can generate PDF reports for an application through the use of XSLT and XSL-FO embedded within the Java application. I also illustrate how the generated PDF file can be sent as an e-mail attachment using JavaMail. Although a variety of Web-based technologies such as servlets or Web services are available, I chose the JSP approach. A simple JSP-based test harness was written to demonstrate the integration of all these technologies. An HTML table report generation example is also included to show how the XSL-FO table elements correspond to the HTML table elements. Although using XSL-FO and XSLT may be overkill, the greater degree of formatti... (more)

Axis-izing Legacy Applications

This article is a follow-up to an earlier article "Exposing Legacy Applications" (WSJ, Vol. 3, issue 5). It demonstrates how to integrate legacy applications with Web services using Apache Axis. Axis, which is a complete rewrite of Apache SOAP, promises to be faster and more flexible than Apache SOAP. Two approaches will be illustrated here. The first uses the Axis API. In the second ap... (more)

Exposing Legacy Applications

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a wire protocol that is similar to CORBA's Internet Inter-ORB protocol (IIOP) for communicating between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages. Unlike IIOP, which is binary in nature, SOAP is text based. This XML-based protocol lets you call an application, or even an individual ob... (more)