Static Pages

Dynamic News generates static pages to display all available news items. These pages are built at intervals set by the news system administrator, for example, every hour on the hour; otherwise, they don't change.

When to Use Static Pages?

Static pages are useful in any application where data doesn't change very often. For example, when publishing daily summaries from ERP or customer applications. Because the content is static, it's more efficient to pregenerate a page than to build one for each user who requests it.

How Static Pages Works

The admin executes a batch process, implemented from the Administration servlet, that queries the database and generates an XML document. When an end-user invokes Dynamic News to display all news, a servlet gets the browser type from the user-agent header of the HTTP request, then reads the XML document, and applies the appropriate XSL stylesheet.

Finally, it returns an HTML page formatted for the end-user's browser, as shown in Figure 6-2.

Another approach would be to apply XSL stylesheets as part of the batch process, generating one HTML file for each stylesheet. In this case, you end up with more files to manage, but the runtime servlet is smaller.

Figure 6-2 Dynamic News: Static Pages - Generating XML Documents