Building a WML Application with Enhydra

Ryan Fife, Anywhereyougo.com

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The first question that you may have is, "What is Enhydra?" Enhydra is an open source application server written entirely in Java. It supports many standards, including XML, HTML, Java Servlets, and JavaServer Pages (JSP).

Lutris Technologies, an Internet consulting company based in California, started developing Enhydra over four years ago because there were no application servers on the market that could meet their needs. Enhydra is built with Java to make it deployable on whatever platform best suits your needs. Lutris was not in the business of selling application servers, so they released Enhydra under an open source license to allow others to benefit from their efforts.

Today, Enhydra has grown into a robust Java application server that is not only feature rich, but also has a diverse group of loyal users and developers. Enhydra remains true to its roots, and is still able to be developed with and deployed on various platforms and web serving environments. It is now more alive than ever, with all the work done to support the latest standards in web development as well as integrating the work of other open source projects such as Xerces, Castor, JSP, Tomcat, JTidy, and so on. In addition to the advantages of the "behind the scenes" technology, Enhydra offers many advantages for the Internet developer:

Ø       Familiar servlet interface.

Ø       Integrated web server to speed the development testing lifecycle.

Ø       Web-based administration tool for servlet control and debugging.

Ø       W3C-DOM based view of HTML and XML files for easier manipulation and separation of business logic and presentation code.

Ø       Built-in logging facilities with a configurable level of output to log files.

Ø       The source code! If you have a question, the code is the authoritative answer.

In this talk, we will be covering how Enhydra works with some of the technologies discussed in the next section, and assume you have at least a working knowledge of some of them (Java, WML, HTML, and servlets). Today we will be covering:

Ø       Installation requirements of Enhydra for development

Ø       Compatible with ANY platform with JDK 1.1! (Linux, Solaris, Windows 2000, etc.)

Ø       The basic structure of an Enhydra application

Ø       How to develop an Enhydra application that can publish to both WML and HTML