WebAlerter - A simple alerting tool which delivers html content directly to the inbox of members of a mailing list. Email body can be modified using an XSL stylesheet to customise colours, content, etc on a per user or group level. Written entirely in Java (except for the stylesheets of course which are XSLT) this application is highly customisable and scalable.
Introduction

RSS is an XML format for syndicating information. One of the most popular applications of RSS is by news and blog websites. Why? Because users interested in the content on these websites like to know when they are updated. RSS is fantastic for doing this. There are a number of RSS readers & aggregators that will download an RSS feed or check for updates at scheduled intervals. Native support is also included in Windows Vista so popularity of RSS should continue to grow.

WebAlerter addresses the exact same problem as RSS - keeps users aprised about changes to web content. The only difference is that while RSS can be considered as a 'pull feed' where users pull it from the webserver, WebAlerter provides you with the means of making a 'push feed', pushing content directly to the inbox of the user. This gives you the flexibility of deciding when to inform your users of updates to a website and also gives you the extra added benefit of delivering richer content since the email body can be HTML or Text. This is in contrast to RSS which does not alow content as richly formated as HTML to be included.


Dependencies


WebAlerter uses a number of open source dependencies. These include:

  1. The Spring Framework - to provide structure, save on code, and all the other benefits of Spring.
  2. JDOM - to parse the custom xml configuration file.
  3. HttpClient - to download the html as specified in the configuration file.
  4. jTidy - to tidy the html content downloaded to make it XHTML.
  5. Saxon - to apply the XSLT stylesheet to the XHTML html content.
  6. log4j - to provide an object orientated and structured approach to logging the process flow through the application.


Process Flow



Configuration


WebAlerter will not work out of the box! It does require a little bit of configuration. Just 2 files need to be edited which takes only a few minutes. These two files are:

  • SMTP Server - Simply place the address of your SMTP server in config/webalerter.properties
  • Recipients - Edit config/recipients.xml. A sample file is included in the distribution. Use the DTD to work out what can go where.

API/Javadocs


click here to view the current javadocs.

Download


Binary/Source download