Groovy supports the concept of builders, which provide an abstraction between the required output content and the representation of it. Groovy supports this by providing a tree like structure in groovy code that represents the required HTML or XML:
import groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder
// create a builder to generate xml like content from a
// builder structure, in this case we choose
// StringWriter as the output, but it could be any writer.
def writer = new StringWriter();
def builder = new MarkupBuilder(writer);
builder.html {
head {
title "Hello world"
}
body {
h1 "My Hello world page"
p "This is the content"
}
}
println(writer);
So what have we done?
We generated some HTML, in this case we just printed it to the console, but we could have sent this back to a web browser for example, or saved it to disk. The XML structure that we generated from above looked as follows:
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello world</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My Hello world page</h1>
<p>This is the content</p>
</body>
</html>
As can be seen, its very straight forward to write XML formatted data with Groovy. To me this was a major feature when I started looking at the language. On the next page I look at a more complex example, of writing an ATOM syndication document using the builder. This requires namespace support and interaction with closures.
Other pages within this category
- Groovychart Bar chart with fixed colour
- Generate an ATOM feed with GroovyBuilder
- Introduction to GSQL (Groovy SQL)
- Reading XML in groovy using XmlParser
- Write XML with GroovyBuilder
- Wrapping JFreeChart as a Groovy builder
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