CRM.COM Page Generator Architecture
In CRM.COM software, we use a mechanism embedded in our framework to dynamically generate the HTML code of the pages, the Page Generator. Using a description language we define the components and the layout of the pages which is in XML format. These XML files are parsed by the Page Generator to generate the HTML code and return it to the browser that issued the request. The page generator renders HTML pages by generating static and dynamic pages using JSP elements and CRM.COM components. The GUI works using mainly two framework components:
1. The Summary component (summary pages)
2. The Page component (data entry pages - layout & definition)
The summary component uses direct SQL statements and consequently resultsets as the only data source, while the page component can also use hibernate java objects as a data source. A developer can create summary screens and detail pages by working exclusively on xml descriptor files.
The main types of files we use in the software are: