Question

Is there an existing open-source Java or JSTL tag library that will render the contents of a passed-in object as HTML content? I’m thinking of an object like this:

Object Cat {
    String name;
    Integer age;
    String color;
    Coat coat;  // Enum: LONG/MEDIUM/SHORT
}

Ideally you could pass in a Cat object and get back an HTML representation of the object’s contents, perhaps with clickable links to expand/collapse content:

<H1>Object Type: Cat </H1>
<ul>
    <li><span>name</span><span>"Fluffy"</span></li>
    <li><span>age</span><span> 9</span></li>
    <li><span>color</span><span> "Tabby"</span></li>
    <li><span>coat</span><span> LONG</span></li>
</ul>

Seems like something that someone might have already written. I would hate to reinvent the wheel.

Answer 1

You may try Xstream library. It converts your java code to xml. Using XSLT, you can convert your xml to html format (Simple xml transformation using xslt is here – XML Transformations).