JDisplay stands for Java Display. It started out as a way to display Java source code listings in a variety of colours, fonts, sizes, and weights to help make them more presentable and Readable on a website. Then I expanded it to handle HTML, bat, btm, SQL, ini, csv, and *.properties files. Then I expanded it further the handle mft, sf, mf and http files.
Why would you use it? For the same sorts of reasons you use colours and fonts in an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse. They make your code much easier to understand for Visitors to your website. The techniques used are more much more efficient of bandwidth than displaying images.
There is no server-side code used. Java utilities parse the code snippets into Compact binary tokens, assigning colours, fonts, sizes and weights to each token. The tokens are compressed with GZIP and stored in *.ser files. These are not as compact as the original text since they include colourising information for each chunk of text. They are usually more compact that the equivalent formatted HTML, but for very small files they can be bigger because of the serialisation overhead of all the fully qualified token class names for the various types of token at the head of the *.ser files. Then the tokens can be rendered three ways:
1. using a Java Applet. This is usually best for very large listings.
2. as piece of CSS style-decorated HTML code you include in your html as an iframe. This is usually best for intermediate listings.
3. inline in your HTML. This is usually best for short listings. The problem, in the process of editing the html it is fairly easy to damage the generated listings. They must be regenerated before every upload.
