Work :: Social Studies Series
- Completed
- June 2002
Need
Publisher Holt, Reinhart, and Winston wanted to create interactive Web sites based on the content in their high school textbooks. This required converting data from a desktop publishing format into Web pages while maintaining the content in a database to preserve its complex interrelations.
Solution
Six Red Marbles contracted me to handle the data transformation segment of this project. To accomplish this, I first devised an XML schema to be generated by an SQL database that had been built from the client’s textbook data. I then created a hierarchy of XSLT templates to handle the task of transforming the database-generated XML markup into Web pages. To link the development effort together, I wrote a configurable, multi-threaded Java application that quickly performed the data transformations based on specified batches. This application allowed the production team to transform one page at a time, several sections or chapters, or an entire textbook.
The result is a system that efficiently and flawlessly transforms SQL-based textbook data into thousands of linked, cross-referenced Web pages. These pages are highly complex and interactive, with maps, quizzes, a student notebook, and glossary links all embedded into the content.
- Contributions:
- Java, XML, XSLT, XHTML, and CSS development.
- CVS source-control administration.
- Automation
- The tool I developed to carry out the daunting task of building such extensive web sites uses two XML-based technologies to make the process automatic and highly efficient. It first abstracts all of the content that needs to be represented in the sites into a basic XML elements that are common to all textbook pages. With this predictable data set, it then uses a hierarchy of XSLT templates to transform the abstracted data in a powerful and flexible way.
Visit the Textbook Sites
- Call to Freedom
- People, Places, and Change
- The American Nation
- World Geography Today
- World History: The Human Journey
- Copyright
- © 2001-2008
- Scott Martin.
- All Rights Reserved.
- Valid
- XHTML and
- CSS.