This toolkit was developped to help developpers to integrate existing web applications and aggregate them as a single website.
The Website Assembling Toolkit can be used as a reverse proxy. Proxied pages can parsed in order to process inclusion instructions that the applications insert.
Two different syntax are supported:
Both syntax enable to retrieve blocks of contents but custom syntax is much more powerfull as you can retrieve pages and use them as a template retrieve blocks from xpath expressions and apply xslt transformations.
The Website Assembling Toolkit offers a taglib that can be used in any JSP-based java web application.
Basically, the taglib looks like Tiles tag library except that it enables you to include contents and use templates coming from other applications that may have been written using any technology and deployed on other servers.
Any functionality used by the taglib or the reverse proxy can be used through a simple API.
HTML pages are fetched from the provider server using regular HTTP requests. Pages are then parsed to find specific delimiters used to define the blocks. The blocks are then aggregated and sent to the browser as a single HTML page.