Designing the Static and Dynamic Areas

In this section, you will see how to populate the various content areas with their data and links. In this discussion, a static area is one that gets its content from the local file system, and a dynamic area is one that is populated from a remote source where the content is unknown to the web server at request time. In this example, this dynamic content will be from database queries and web services. For ease of development and the ability to support multiple browsers, all content will be delivered in XML, and the XSQL servlet will apply the appropriate XSLT stylesheet to produce HTML or another device-appropriate markup language such as WML.

Creating the Dynamic Areas

For this sample page, there are two dynamic areas: What’s New and Hot Topics. The What’s New area is created by retrieving listings from the database, while the Hot Topics area is generated from a web service offered on OTN.