JDO, XML and Tomcat technologies bring Swiss Tennis Interclub championships onto the web!

The Internet Interclub Championship Management (I2CM) project was started in late 2000. The challenge was to transpose a completely centralized system based on a relational database, where data entry and publication were done at a single location, onto the web. No big changes were allowed in the database structure to keep other existing applications running.

We decided early to use servlet technology to handle user sessions and authentication, dynamic content management and data entry.
HTML generation turned out to be a bigger challenge because I2CM had to be integrated into a larger, ColdFusion™ managed site (http://www.mytennis.ch). The site was in the middle of a deep redesign process (contents and presentation) and we should not be unable to get presentation and stylesheet specifications until a very late time in the project, which had to be used for this spring’s championship.

We had to remain totally flexible on the presentation side, even on which data would be displayed on each page. The presentation issue was solved by using XSLT stylesheets: They make it easy to adapt database data to arbitrary presentation requirements.
The raw data production was a bigger problem, as we wanted to be able to produce on the fly XML documents representing an arbitrary, dynamically defined subset of the database.

Java Data Objects, a new API developed within the Java Community Process as JSR-012, is the key of the problem solution. Navigation between instances in the object model can be carried out by simple attribute references, which means that an arbitrary subset of the database can be generated dynamically at any time as a connected object graph.
The JDO-enabled database mapper and runtime developed by ICS Computer Services can produce arbitrary dynamic XML documents by specifying only a root object or collection  fetched using a JDO query function.
Such a JDO-linked DOM, fed to the XSLT processor, effectively allowed us to produce stylesheet-controlled contents (XML, HTML or WML), without writing a single line of specific code apart from the stylesheet!

Over 76'000 match results have been entered and over 2'000'000 pages delivered since the system has been put into operation in April 2001.

See the Swiss Tennis Interclub pages:

• French
• German
  

Gordan Vosicki
UBIK SA, 2001-06-22

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