WebGlandula

What?

A simple yet powerful program for quick generation of many static HTML pages from an existing template and a table. Each row in the table will become a file, and each column is a variable to be evaluated.

WebGlandula is intended to create and manage a large number of HTML pages that all have the same skeleton, but have minor differences. This is useful for, e.g. a catalogus of a webshop that lacks a well organised database. In WebGlandula, adding a new page is done by adding a row to the table. Modifying all pages at once is done by modifying the skeleton file, which we call the template.

WebGlandula runs on the Java 1.5 platform.

Binaries and sources at the project page.

Global usage

WebGlandula's window is divided into two parts. The left part is the "table" which can be saved to an XML file. The right part of the window is the "viewer". It can show the template as well as the output for the currently selected row.

First, you make the template with any program you like, thereby inserting so called variables, which are surrounded by double hashes (##) as on the screenshot below. When the template is loaded into WebGlandula, the plain template view highlights the variables.

If a variable is highlighted with a white foreground and a blue background (like those on the screenshot below) then the variable is not added yet to the table.

Initially there is only the "filename" variable in the table, which is always the rightmost column and cannot be removed. This variable is special because it tells WebGlandula the names of the files to generate. It can contain slashes to generate a tree of files.

The power of WebGlandula is that you can refer from a variable to the variables on its left side. This is done the same way as in the template, that is, place them between hashes. So because the "filename" variable is always at the right side of the table, you can use all other variables in the filepath.

The plain output view shows the generated file for the currently selected row:

The html view renders the page like a webbrowser:

How to

• load a template html file: in the toolbar, click the "..." button next to the "template file" box and select a file
• add a variable/column: click the "+" button and enter the name of the variable (without surrounding hashes)
• remove a variable/column: select a cell in the column and click the "-" button
• add a file/row: double-click on the empty space below the table
• delete a file/row: select cells and press the delete key
• fill in many cells at once: type your text in the box next to the "set" button and then click that button
• specify an output directory: click the "..." button next to the "output dir" box and select a directory
• generate the files:in the toolbar, click the button showing the spider
• save/load table xml files:in the toolbar, click the buttons
• undo your changes: not possible, so be sure to save and backup frequently, and watch out for the delete key!

Status

release 0.2

usable beta status

known bugs:

• The table can't scroll horizontally.
• A modified template is not reloaded automatically.

wanted features

1. ability to put long texts with multiple lines in the cells

2. comma separated table files

3. global variables

4. edit the template internally

5. special variable at the left side, the row number, which can be hidden

author Tom Jansen

email

WebGlandula uses generationjava.com's XML writer library which is moved to http://www.osjava.org/xmlwriter/