| | Some efforts involving multicast protocols have not yet taken off, like Multicast Backbone (MBONE). (See Resources for a link.) Many vendors of applications and services in the video, audio, and generic data feed market do not use multicast. Their applications often establish point-to-point connections between the clients and servers. Multicast is not something you just use in your application; multicast protocols require support at the protocol stack level and in the network infrastructure. | Brazil is a third-generation HTTP server that provides an extensible, understandable framework for building small, application-specific HTTP servers. In Parts 1 through 5 of this series, I discussed how to use Brazil technology to process content from various nontraditional sources, how to add to that content, and how to deliver that content to users via different delivery mechanisms and networks, such as applets, Java Reliable Multicast Service (JRMS), wireless clients, and plain HTML. In this final article of the series, I illustrate how to use the following technologies with Brazil: | The Brazil Web server, which I introduced in my previous column, will be implemented as an experimental application server. (See the sidebar below, Brazil: An extensible Java Web server, for more information about the Brazil project.) In that article, I discussed how you can support X10 devices by means of a Brazil handler. This time around, the handlers, which realize specific interfaces for different connection protocols, will extend the Brazil Web server so that users can employ varying network protocols and technologies to connect to it. | In Part 2, I discussed how to produce and synthesize XML content. In Part 3, I will demonstrate how to deploy a simple application to three different mobile targets using commonly available technology. You can't control the software and hardware environment of wireless devices but, by using well-constructed server technologies, you can economically adapt to them. Deployment, maintenance, and development costs drop if we only use one language. Of course, I would prefer Java to be that universal language for wireless devices, and that day may come to pass. In the meantime, however, you can utilize the methodology described in this article to support the various languages. | To show how Brazil can create new content from existing content, I will demonstrate how it allows users to create their own portfolios, remembers this information, and delivers the data as a Web service. In addition, in this article I'll show you how to parse non-XML-based content. Many Websites don't provide XML representations of their data, and while that isn't always a showstopper, some Websites produce content in such a way that the data is nearly impossible to parse. Using Brazil, you can process this content to create new XML-enabled data. | In prior articles, I configured the Brazil Web server to interface with a realtime weather station and provide Web data in the typical manner -- content plus data together -- as shown in Listing 1. For display to users, this approach is suitable, but more and more new Web applications consist of data from multiple Websites. Requiring developers that work on these new types of applications to parse HTML can lead to complications. To create a new service, developers would have to parse the data to obtain the weather information from site A to combine with site C's data. A process that separates the formatting from the content would solve these complications. |
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