University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science


SOHANI PATEL
will defend her thesis

JAVA TAG LIBRARY BASED SERVER SIDE HTML MAPPING CONTROLS



Abstract

Web applications have become popular for various uses including online shopping, information search and communication. HTML is one of the most widely used languages for development of such applications that depends on server side languages like JSP to solve its inherent problems. Embedding HTML in the JSP makes the code lengthy and unreadable for the big applications, which also makes it difficult to modify and maintain. Separating the logic from the presentation can solve this problem. An inherent problem with HTML controls to retain the state also needs to be addresses. Also, JSP needs to adapt to new development in the technology and provide ability to generate code for languages other than HTML, like WML for PDAs.

This thesis is an attempt to provide custom tags to provide flexibility and ease of maintenance of JSP code. Several custom tags are developed using Java to provide flexibility to respond according to the browser making the request and to retain the state of the control. HTML was selected in this project for mapping of the controls. All custom tags are designed to allow formatting using Cascading Style Sheets. A unique control, Repeater, was developed to provide database access and capability to iterate through the data retrieved from the database to populate the nested custom tags.  The custom tags developed in this thesis are designed to work with and without use of the Repeater developed in this project.

Date: 15, April, 2004
Time: 06:00 P.M.
Place: 550-PGH



Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Venkat Subramaniam