I have started an open source project on GoogleCode called THTMLWriter.
THTMLWriter is a Delphi-based class library that enables you to create HTML code and HTML documents. It uses the fluent interface to make creating HTML text easy and natural. You can create HTML Documents or HTML “chunks” by using any tag as a base.
THTMLWriter is all class based. I started out trying to do some fancy things with interfaces, but it just got too complicated, and so I opted to go with the “simplest thing that will work” option, and now you can write code that looks like this:
Temp := THTMLWriter.CreateDocument;
TempHTML := Temp
The project more or less produces XHTML code at the 4.01 level – I’ve tried to be XHTML-compatible, but I confess I haven’t been fanatical about it. That is one of the things I want to in the future. In addition, I want to update the project to support HTML5. I’m still thinking about how to do that.
The project is pretty complete – you should be able to construct most HTML constructs. I’ve provided a lot of overrides and default parameters for many of the “normal” attributes on a given tag. I’ll continue to update the project with improvements and refinements. I’ve used HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference from O’Reilly as my guide. I haven’t quite implemented everything, but it’s definitely at the point the that it is ready for you fine people.
The project includes a full set of DUnit tests to give you confidence that the code actually does what it is supposed to.
I have added a lot of XMLDoc comments to the code, but it’s far from complete. I’ve used the Documentation Insight plugin from DevJET software – the guys who do the Delphi Spring Framework. (I can’t recommend this plugin enough – an outstanding contribution to the Delphi community, above and beyond the amazing Delphi Spring Framework.)
You can get the code from Google code using Mercurial. We are planning on migrating our codebase here at Gateway Ticketing to Mercurial after the first of the year, and this project was my learning curve for using Mercurial. Now that I’ve been using Mercurial – a distributed source control system – I wonder how we as developers ever managed to use anything but a DVCS. It is that good and that powerful. I heartily recommend looking at migrating to a DVCS. It’s so much more flexible and more powerful than a server based solution such as Subversion
I’d be very happy to add anyone to the project who is interested in contributing. I’ll also be happy to integrate submitted patches as well. This have been a fun project to keep my toe in the water of coding – being a manager now means I don’t get to code as much as I want --but living alone in Pennsylvania while my amazing wife moves our house out here has given me a lot of free time to code.
Enjoy and let me know what you think.