About this page

• The HTML code defines the text and form controls (radio buttons) on this page.

• The JavaScript code streamlines one facet of this page -- the radio buttons. You may have noticed that the radio buttons are not accompanied by a "submit" button. That's because the JavaScript event handler named onClick is used with each radio button. The code looks like this:

  onClick="submit()"

  Thus, when you click on a particular button, the form data is immediately submitted to the server.

• When you click one of the radio buttons, your form data is submitted to Signature's XAP server. There, an MTB program receives the data from this page (i.e., the value of the radio button that was clicked, or the orientation of the bar graph). The MTB program reads the corresponding record from a Comet keyed file containing average monthly temperature statistics for 1988 through 2000. The program then merges the data fields from that record into this web page (which is actually an XAP web page template) using the MERGE control.

  Clicking on the "edit" radio button starts a different MTB program on the XAP server, one which lets you edit the data in the Comet file.

• The Java applet draws the bar graph using the data from the Comet file. The applet receives this data via the <param> parameter within the <applet> tag on this page (view the source of this web page to see how this works). Note: The bar chart applet was written by Sun Microsystems and is distributed free-of-charge.

For a more detailed description of this demo, including information on how to download the HTML, Javascript, XAP, and Java files that created this page, please see the tip entitled Using eComet with Java.