The Goldfish Chronicles

Books, open-source and Java fill a lot of my time. So I decided to let this potential scratch drive an itch to do something simple and fun; making a website about books on open-source Java projects.

It’s currently a sub-directory at osjava.org, http://www.osjava.org/pergamum/, but will get its own domain name soon [better than wasting 8 dollars on 2 beers anyway]. It’s implemented in an odd way that I aim to continue to play with. MVC + XML. I’m sick of always starting these projects as an sql schema, so having failed to keep the itch scratching in that method a few months previously, I decided to implement the database as a series of XML files. Very loose.

It was but a short step from there to trying to use XSL to create HTML pages, rather than bothering my servers with dynamic code. However, this felt bad. I wanted to do something like sitemesh/tiles, where a layout is defined which includes various lesser pages. Portal-like.

So I created a series of content files in xml which describe the site itself. The XSL [and the simple Java file that runs it all] is responsible for taking the content files and db files and creating the HTML from their union. Lots of good XSL lessons learnt, though HTML seems to leak into all parts of the system. This is a laziness I guess, p and a tags could be renamed to para and link to slowly create a non-html schema.

It’s hiding in the new osjava svn repository if anyone’s interested.

The next step was to try and have a nice look and feel. Well I suck at this as I have no colour sense at all. The initial colours I chose [a nice red and green] seemed to make people vomit [or to quote Steve, “Make my eyes want to vomit”], so I simplified it all. It’s probably still terrible, but at least your eyes are still dry. Anyway, nice look and feel ish occurred in pure CSS. I dislike pure CSS as absolute positioning makes me squirm, but it seems to be okay above 800×600.

If anyone has any opinions, I’d be interested in hearing them [username: bayard domain: generationjava.com].

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2004 at 10:05 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.