System and methods for tag library generation

Abstract

Conventional tag libraries facilitate web page development by referencing external code from within an HTML page via a mnemonic tag, however such conventional tag libraries typically rely on a manually generated set of supporting code. Such supporting code typically requires a thorough knowledge of the underlying code language, such as Java, C++ and Java Server Pages (JSP). A tag library generator for generating the supporting code corresponding to a tag library mitigates the shortcomings of manually generated support code by parsing a metadata file defining the operations and functions provided by the supporting code. The parser extracts components and renderers corresponding to the supporting code. Each of the components may have corresponding properties, and each of the renderers may have corresponding attributes, which the parser also extracts. The tag library generator receives the parsed items, and processes each of the components with corresponding renderers to generate the applicable support code. The support code includes a tag library descriptor defining the tags whose attributes are a combination of component properties and renderer attributes, a tag handler class definition, in which each tag handler class corresponds to a 'tag' entry in the TLD file, and component objects for maintaining the state of web output pages.