What is it?

The Element Construction Set is a Java API for generating elements for various markup languages it directly supports HTML 4.0 and XML, but can easily be extended to create tags for any markup language. It is designed and implemented by Stephan Nagy and Jon S. Stevens.

What does it do?


out.println("<HTML>");
out.println("<HEAD><TITLE>Demo<TITLE><HEAD>");
out.println("<BODY>");
out.println("<H1>Demo Header<H1>");
out.println("<H3>Sub Header:<H3>");
out.println("<FONT SIZE=\"+1\" FACE=\"Times\" COLOR=\"#FFFFFF">The big dog &amp; the little cat chased each other.<FONT>");
out.println("<BODY>");
out.println("<HTML>");


Html html = new Html()
              .addElement(new Head()
              .addElement(new Title("Demo")
              .addElement(new Body()
              .addElement(new H1("Demo Header"))
              .addElement(new H3("Sub Header:"))
              .addElement(new Font().setSize("+1")
                         .setColor(HtmlColor.WHITE)
                         .setFace("Times")
                         .addElement("The big dog & the little cat chased each other.));
out.println(html.toString()); 
// or write to the outputstream directly
output(out);


Document doc = new Document()
              .appendTitle("Demo")
              .appendBody(new H1("Demo Header"))
              .appendBody(new H3("Sub Header:"))
              .appendBody(new Font().setSize("+1")
                         .setColor(HtmlColor.WHITE)
                         .setFace("Times")
                         .addElement("The big dog & the little cat chased each other.));
out.println(doc.toString()); 
// or write to the outputstream directly
output(out);

There are some subtleties in the above code that are worth commenting on.

You don't need to know the Hex value of the color you want. HtmlColor is an interface that defines more than 200 colors.
You don't need to replace & < > ' " with their entity counterparts, it is done for you (this is configurable of course). ECS gives you the ability to define filters that are applied to the element when you call the addElement() methods.
You can write directly to an output stream of the elements. output() is a method that can be overridden to provide custom rendering of elements.

ECS

XML my_element = new XML("my_element");

<my_element></my_element>

Documentation

The javadoc documentation comes and a TestBed.java file comes with the distribution download that gives example code usage for every single element.

Where do I get releases?

You can get the latest version of ECS from http://java.apache.org/ecs/dist/

How do I contribute, give feedback, fix bugs and so on?

We have a mailing list for discussion of the code.
Access to the CVS "ecs" repository is available both online as well as with a cvs client.

Thanks for your interest in ECS!