On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 01:02:12 GMT, Raymond DeCampo
<nospam@twcny.rr.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

I have system for generating a website statically. .  It has a number
of parts.

1. macro expansion.  You write the macros in Java.  You can look on my
website and see what some of them can do. It is nice having the full
power of java to do file i/o and other thing you could imagine. Search
for the word "macro".  I can so some SSI-like stuff like file date and
size inclusion. There is a nestable include macro. I can't do hit
counts, at least not up-to-date ones.  Macros that save me a lot of
time are  Image that inserts the width and height automatically.
headers and footers that are quite clever, and of course nicely
encapsulated. You just change the say the copyright display method and
bang tho whole site is fixed. Book Refer  generate links to muliple
bookstores.  Links about Java versions, directories, JavaDoc and
filenames all automatically kick over when a new Sun version comes
out. I can do  all the same things you can in JSP, with the
restriction I have to have the data at Upload time. I can't wait for
the user to tell me something.

2. compression.  It remove excess whitespace from the HTML to speed
downloads.  Someday I might take it a step futher and remove all
comments and the macro original text too.

3. index generation.  I have various glossaries and it builds master
and letter level index pages.

4. Untouching.  This redates files back to what they used to be if
they have not really changed.  It gets rid of any spurious updates to
avoid uploads.

5. JDisplay with preprocessse listings to colourise them and embed
them either as applets or HTML. It can handle HTML, XML, Java, SQL,
BAT,  ini, csv, properties etc. It has robust parsers that can handle
fragments and bad code.

6. replicator. Allows people to maintain an up to date mirror with
minimal downloading.

I have used this myself gradually improving it over the years not
worrying to much about generality.

I have not published it.  If someone is interested, I can get around
to packaging it up. It requires a Java programmer to use, since you
need to write or modify the macros for your own site.

Why bother?  why not use JSP?  You have no budget.  You don't have
access to a powerful enough JSP server to generate content
dynamically.   This all works with a vanilla HTTP server with FTP
upload.

The other reason is you want to generate content to be read offline.
JSP can't do that.  You can distribute your website on CD and it is
readable.