Configuring support for XML output

Since GI is a view technology, it makes sense to start our GI integration here at the view resolver.

Any Ajax implementation makes certain demands of the server. A key pre-requisite is a structured message. GI, like most Ajax libraries, is highly optimized around this concept (though GI also provides a less optimal means to consume and display server generated chunks of HTML as well). Therefore we need Spring to produce a simple, consistent XML payload.

Spring makes our life easy in this regard. Spring can chain view resolvers, passing the requested view to a series of resolvers until it one responds with a view that can render the model. Our first change will be to add a XMLViewResolver. The XMLViewResolver is a Spring provided class that reads a configuration file of view names that we want rendered into XML.


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The views.xml configures our view implementation, a single class that renders xml.



Our system now looks like this...