Common Weeds of the Carribean is an illustrated database of plants we observed in the village of El Limon in the Dominican Republic. Wrox Press has permitted me to reprint a book chapter I wrote about Common Weeds for Professional Java Server Programming.
Common Weeds is a sequel to Weeds of El Limon, which was was generated by a Java program that converted XML descriptions of weeds into static HTML pages. The software behind Common Weeds reads the XML weed descriptions and loads them into a MySQL database. It formats the descriptions with Java Server Pages (.jsp files) which access the database through Java Beans. I store fragments of free-formatted XML in TEXT columns in the database and Java servlets to retrieve images stored in BLOB columns.
I erase evidence of dynamic generation (URLs that end in .jsp or have /servlet/ in them.) using Apache's URL rewriting. This makes the site compatible with web crawlers, so I can make static copies of the site with w3mir and ensure that Common Weeds is indexed by search engines such as Altavista.
You can download a copy of our data and software here. You might also be interested in an older technical article about the original Weeds of El Limon.
Weeds of El Limon 2 (Part 1)
The problem
The site
How it works
The unfriendly net
The tools
XML, SQL and Java Objects (Part 2)
XML: the legacy application
Mapping XML to SQL
Storing XML fragments in the database
The Weeds class
Mapping a relational database to objects
Creating and loading the database
URL Rewriting and file layout
What the pages look like to a web browser
What's really on the server
JSP and Java Beans (Part 3)
index.jsp and common.jsp
weeds.jsp
error.jsp
The Beans
Serving images out of the database
ViewWeed.java
InsertImages.java
Conclusion
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Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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