Chapter 15
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Summary
The benefits of applying Java and XML within a system are certainly not solely restricted to J2EE
server-based programming. There are many real-life design scenarios where client-side Java
programming and XML processing can be deployed to our advantage. In fact, nearly all contemporary
mainstream browsers will support medium weight client designs where significant processing can be
performed on the client machine.
In this chapter, we have examined an end-to-end case study in which client-side Java XML processing is
a major component in our design strategy.
Our simulation made heavy use of XML as the data interchange format of choice. Along the way, we
have gained firsthand design and programming experience in implementing client-side XML processing
and presentation, including exposure to:
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HTTP tunneling
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Filtering and parsing XML documents
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Creating applets to handle data display and to access data sources
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Using a testing tool to ensure that our data is refreshed correctly
Finally, we examined the latest available built-in facilities for handling XML on the mainstream
browsers, among which were XSLT, XML data islands, and CSS. These built-in features can be used to
our advantage as tools in our arsenal for building effective web application systems.
In the next chapter we will examine other ways to format XML data for graphical presentation. We will
be returning to server-side techniques to provide us with a much richer graphical interface, and looking
at technologies such as SVG, XSL-FO, and PDF.