Simon Kitching wrote:
Hi All,
I'm trying to use jspwiki as the "help engine" for an internal
application. The intention is that documentors write help for a
web-application using jspwiki, then we bundle up the pages and include
them *plus the necessary jspwiki infrastructure to render them* in our
.war file. Initially it would be view-only, but later we might try to
implement a custom "page provider" (?) to allow users to modify the
default pages, with a database used as backing storage.
I'm just starting on this, and before I spend too much time: has anyone
done anything similar?
Yes, I have. Not exactly as a help engine, but similar embedding situation.
The first issue I expect to strike is that the url triggering jspwiki
will be of form "/ourwebapp/help/Wiki.jsp?page=ZZZ". Does jspwiki run ok
under a path that is not the webapp root?
I haven't yet tried this under 2.6, but in 2.4 it did not. However it
wasn't that hard to patch the code to get it working. I have that code
and could sent it too you, or if Janne thinks it's worth it I could make
a patch for 2.6 out of it, though that would definitely require some
clean up, and testing.
The second issue is that I would really prefer to avoid unpacking the
jspwiki resource files (jsp, js, images, config-files) into the "main"
war, such that the files from jspwiki get mingled with the ones for our
war. That effectively means that I need to get jspwiki running directly
out of a jarfile without being unpacked. A few things might be
unavoidable (eg copying tlds into the "real" WEB-INF dir, referencing
jspwiki servlet-filters from the main web.xml) but getting this even 99%
working would be great. The main problems appear to be:
* handling code like "pageContext.forward(someurl)". I don't expect
servlet engines (and specifically Tomcat 6) will be capable of finding
jsp files that are within a jarfile. However hopefully pre-compiling the
jsps will solve that, and the war-tomcat target in the buildfile is a
good start. I would still need to merge this "web.xml fragment" somehow
into the main web.xml, but that's not too bad.
* serving the necessary image and javascript files. It is possible for a
servlet to catch requests to resources and instead load them from the
classpath. The Apache Myfaces Tomahawk ExtensionsFilter does this. I
presume the paths used by jsps to reference them will be relative to the
webapp root, though, making it difficult to detect which are our
resources and which are jspwiki ones, plus making name-collisions
between them possible.
We unpacked and merged. JSPs, javascript, and the like, all went in a
subdirectory, aka, "/ourwebapp/help/". If you're running read-only you
really don't need any of that however, as you can write a custom servlet
that will load the wiki text and pass it to the WikiRenderer to get your
output HTML (this is a bit of a simplification, but pretty close), then
all you need is the JAR. We actually did both or the methods described.
One context was running read-only where the content was displayed in
pages with tightly integrated L&F, and the other context was an
administrative one for editing.
