FYI: my setup may be a little different: Sevak-Jetty running out of Phoenix container, with Sevak hacked a little so that it loads all webapps in /opt/webapps (or whatever value of web-apps-dir is in config.xml file). I then set my build.webapp (I think its the right property?) dir to /opt/webapps/cocoon .
Is anyone else travelling this road as well? If so I'd like to hear about what you've found.
Yup :) I have my Phoenix application mounting a Sevak block which loads two web applications based on Cocoon, passing in a parent ComponentManager so Cocoon can access other Phoenix blocks. I recently committed a patch to CocoonServlet which made getParentComponentManager a protected method so it can be overriden. All you have to do is extend CocoonServlet and make it Serviceable and use that as the parent for Cocoon's container hierarchy.
Eventually I would like to be able to : 1. Create a .sar file that packages one or more Cocoon blocks 2. Deploy that .sar file by dropping it into $PHOENIX/apps 3. On the .sar's deployment have it publish a CocoonBlockService 4. Have A Cocoon.sar (based on Sevak) look for on startup, and listen for during the lifecycle, instances of CocoonBlockService and integrate the represented block within Cocoon. 5. Add a 'sar' target to builds the sar file in the 'build.sar' location (set in local.build.properties and possibly defaulting to $PHOENIX/apps if $PHOENIX is not null).
The kicker here is that there is (currently) no way to have inter-SAR communication in phoenix. Each SAR is its own isolated application. Sevak's current design is at the block level, rather than at the SAR level. What you could do is create a single SAR with a Sevak-hosted Cocoon as well as other block's and have those other blocks be available to Cocoon (basically the design I outlined above).
With the new "auto-assembly" patches for Phoenix, your step 4 could be accomplished by declaring an Array dependency on a CocoonBlockService, and then the Sevak-hosting block would automatically pick up all CocoonBlockServices w/o having to do a listener.
I'd love to hear thoughts from people more experienced with Avalon and/or Cocoon (just about everybody right now) on whether this is a) Has been done before
You're on the cutting edge of integration ;)
c) a 'good thing' and suggestions on how to go about it
Outlined above :) Feedback welcome! -pete
