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Throughout this tutorial, the objective was to show you how to use the servlet utilities. It is not my intent to imply that there isn't anything better... because there is! If your web application needs other capabilities, or has no need for generating PDF files or charts, here are some other tools that can help you.

The biggest problem with servlet development is the need to integrate the work of web page designer with the dynamic content provided by your servlets. This isn't so much of an issue as long as you keep the dynamic pages separate from the static HTML; but this is rarely the case. If for no other reason than the consistent general look-and-feel of the web site, you will want to let the web page designer control the appearance of your servlets, too. This is why the HtmlPage class should only be used for prototypes.

There are a number of big problems with letting the web page designer make decisions about the server side components. For one thing, the tendency will be for them to use Microsoft FrontPage. FrontPage will encourage the use of ASP. ASP almost guarantees that WindowsNT and Microsoft IIS will be the server side of the application. This severely limits the scalability and portability that is the reason that your company chose Java for. In short, unless an IT department is very careful about choices that impact their infrastructure, they can swallow a proprietary Microsoft hook.

In response to this, JavaSoft is presently pushing the use of JSP - which (to the web page designer) looks a lot like ASP. It is a suitable alternative to ASP; but both ASP and JSP fail to separate the HTML GUI from the dynamic content provided on the server. It breaks the object design to have web pages which include source code in them (kind of a flashback to the "code snippets" that DBase and FoxPro had).

A much cleaner - perhaps ideal - approach is to have a server-side component which is an object representation of the web page, and provide methods to allow your servlet code to modify it. This is exactly what the Enhydra XMLC tools do.

I recently became aware of "WebMacro", which you might want to take a look at in addition to Enhydra and these other fine tools.

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