These are the implicit objects available to the EL context:

now

A java.util.Date object the represents the current time.

Init-params:

negativeMapping

A regular expression matching request URIs to be ignored. The URI is obtained using HttpServletRequest.getRequestURI(). See also the regular expression documentation

This is a typical usage example:

<filter>
  <filter-name>httpHeaders</filter-name>
  <filter-class>
    org.ft.servlet.filters.httpheaders.HTTPHeadersFilter
  </filter-class>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>Expires</param-name>
    <param-value>${now.time + 1000 * 60}</param-value>
  </init-param>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>Last-Modified</param-name>
    <param-value>${now}</param-value>
  </init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
  <filter-name>httpHeaders</filter-name>
  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

Requirements

• Jakarta Commons EL
• Servlet 2.4 compliant container

Download

• http-headers-0.0.0 (source + binary)

Legal

This is Open Source software distributed under the Apache License Version 2.0.

Goals

• Achieve technology independent and (hopefully) stable URIs.
• Simplify site construction and navigation among JSPs.

Clean URIs

With Juseppe, your URIs will not reveal the underlying technology. This is both a security advantage and a wise naming design: when you’ll reimplement your site with a new technology chances are you’ll be able to preserve the old URIs and break no links. Your URIs will look like:

http://www.dumbnews.com/politics

http://www.dumbnews.com/article/4321

and not:

http://www.dumbnews.com/politics.jsp

http://www.dumbnews.com/article.jsp?id=4321

Site structure

Juseppe simplifies JSP development and mantainance by providing a navigation system among web application resources. Instead of hardcoding links and site sections inside JSPs, Juseppe puts the website structure in a freeform XML file. URIs are then mapped to XML nodes and to JSPs using XPath expressions. This makes adding and removing sections much easier than delving inside spaghetti JSP code.

This is a typical XML configuration:

<page name="." resource="/home.jsp" display="Homepage">
<page name="politics" resource="/politics.jsp" display="Politics"/>
<page name="technology" resource="/technology.jsp" display="Technology"/>
<page name="article" resource="/article.jsp"/>
</page>

Take a look to the demo!

The quickest way to grasp the concept behind this project is trying the sample webapp included in the distribution.

Starting a new web application from scratch

1. Drop juseppe-x.x.x.war found in the binary distribution in your servlet container web application directory.

Using Juseppe in an existing web application

1. Extract juseppe-x.x.x.war using the jar utility (or any other zip utility).
2. Copy the libraries found in WEB-INF/lib to your application WEB-INF/lib directory.
3. Copy WEB-INF/juseppe.xml to your application WEB-INF directory.
4. Open WEB-INF/web.xml, then cut’n’paste the Juseppe Filter definition and mapping to your web.xml.
5. Customize WEB-INF/juseppe.xml according to your website structure.
6. Possibly customize Juseppe Filter init-params in WEB-INF/web.xml.

For reference documentation see the Javadocs included in the distribution.

Status

Juseppe is production ready. It is currently used on the following (italian) sites:

• Kataweb News
• Kataweb Multimedia
• Radio DeeJay
• Repubblica Multimedia
• XL
• Kataweb.it
• Kataweb Fido (A web-based feed aggregator)

Legal

Juseppe is Open Source software distributed under the Apache License Version 2.0.

Requirements

• Servlet 2.4 compliant container
• Jaxen XPath Engine (included in the package)

Download

• Juseppe 1.0.3 Binaries (Upgraded to Jaxen 1.1b7)
• Juseppe 1.0.3 Sources
• Juseppe 1.0.2 Binaries
• Juseppe 1.0.2 Sources
• Juseppe 1.0.1 Binaries (Removed dependency on Commons Logging)
• Juseppe 1.0.1 Sources
• Juseppe 1.0.0 Binaries
• Juseppe 1.0.0 Sources

Originally the Standard Taglib used the Jaxen XPath processor. With version 1.1 the project switched to Xalan, decreasing performance by a factor of 100. At my company we chose to use JSTL and we’re really happy about it. But our sites must work now, so I put together this patched version. I hope to be able to use the official version very soon. In the meanwhile, if you’re using JSTL in a production environment give this version a try.

I submitted this patch to the Standard Taglib developers but it was refused because it implies a dependency on Jaxen. Here’s the original thread on the taglibs-dev at jakarta.apache.org mailing list.

To install over an existing webapp just drop in the standard-*.*.*-patched.jar and remove standard.jar.
You also need jaxen-*.*.jar from the Jaxen project.

Requirements

• JSTL APIs
• Jaxen XPath Engine

Download

• standard-1.1.2-patched-jaxen-1.1.jar (works with Jaxen 1.1)

• The modified source file (org.apache.taglibs.standard.tag.common.xml.XPathUtil) (works with Jaxen 1.1)
• standard-1.1.2-patched.jar (works with Jaxen 1.0)
• standard-1.1.1-patched.jar (works with Jaxen 1.0)
• The modified source file (org.apache.taglibs.standard.tag.common.xml.XPathUtil) (works with Jaxen 1.0)

Features

• the XML document and the stylesheet can be retrieved from the local webapp or from the network (using java.net).
• Stylesheet is preloaded at startup and then periodically reloaded in the background in order to optimize performance.
• JSP EL expressions can be used in the Servlet init params.
• Parameters can be passed to the stylesheet.
• XSLT output properties can be controlled by the Servlet.
• Not tied to a specific XML parser or XSLT processor.
  This Servlet uses javax.xml.transform (aka TrAX) for XSLT processing.

This is a sample web.xml configuration:

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>myTransformation</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>it.kataweb.xslt.servlet.XSLTServlet</servlet-class>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>xml</param-name>
    <param-value>http://domain.org/service?param=${param.myParam}</param-value>
  </init-param>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>xslt</param-name>
    <param-value>/WEB-INF/xslt/myStylesheet.xslt</param-value>
  </init-param>
  <init-param>
    <param-name>xsltReloadInterval</param-name>
    <param-value>60</param-value>
  </init-param>
</servlet>

For reference documentation see the Javadocs included in the distribution.

Legal

This Servlet is Open Source software distributed under the Apache License Version 2.0.

Requirements

• Servlet 2.4 compliant container
• Jakarta Commons EL (included in the package)

Download

• XSLT Servlet 1.1.0 Binaries
• XSLT Servlet 1.1.0 Sources
• XSLT Servlet 1.0.0 Binaries
• XSLT Servlet 1.0.0 Sources

Areas of interest

• Web development
• Advanced web browsing

Features

• Download and scan user-defined file types.
• Rename dynamic resources. Encode query strings into filenames.
• Set the number of simultaneous connections.
• Options for minimum and maximum file size.
• Domain depth support.

While many bots around are focused on page indexing, Arale is primarly designed for personal use. It fits the needs of advanced web surfers and web developers. Some real life cases are:

• downloading only images, videos, mp3 or zip files from a site.
• manuals, articles, ebooks fragmented in many files to discourage download.
• user-unfriendly sites. Popups, banners and tricky scripts annoying you before you can download a resource.

Multithreaded means that Arale can download more than one file simultaneously. Arale can easily saturate your bandwidth, thus providing the fastest possible download speed for your internet connection.

If you’re developing dynamic sites using technologies such as JSP, PHP, ASP or whatever, you may be interested in rendering dynamic pages to static files.
Arale supports URL renaming: query string is encoded in the static filename and .html extension is appended. let’s make an example:

• original URL: mypage.jsp!myparam=myvalue.html
• static filename: mypage.jsp!myparam=myvalue.html

Existing links to renamed URLs are substituted with modified links. This preserves navigation among static files. Once a dynamic site is trasformed into a set of static files it can be deployed on a server that does not support dynamic pages. For example you may deploy a JSP site in a free web space.

Currently Arale is a command-line tool. It would be nice to develop a GUI for it. I’d like to have some feedback from users, so if you think it’s worth send me an email and tell me what you think.

Requirements

• Java Runtime Environment (JRE)

Download

• arale.zip