Hello and question
Hello, A word of introduction... I belonged to the list a year or so back, but got sidetracked from Cocoon for awhile. Now I'm back tinkering with 2.04, and have no shortage of questions. Here's one (a rather broad and newbie-ish one.) In my project I have a large number of XML files that correspond to time series. Each is the same format: timeSeries seriesNameP12345/seriesName observation date2001-03-12/date value1.25/value date2001-03-13/date value1.28/value /observation /timeSeries ... etc. Now: using the various mechanisms available through Cocoon, how best would I query a given file (directly, as opposed to through a database) via an HTML form, e.g., to extract and display only selected dates/values? I have a vague grasp of various ways I could do this if my data were to reside in an intermediate DBMS of some sort, but the objective here is to store each time series as an XML source file only, while still being able to query it. Does this make any sense? :) - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hello and question
On 21 Jan 2003 at 18:29, John Austin wrote: As always, ... it depends ... You haven't said how many different time-series files you will be using and you haven't said how often these will be updated and/or queried. Your proposed solution may be appropriate and quite simple to implement or it may be a disaster in the making. Outsiders can't help you without much more information. Yes, I know it was a broad (and not especially Cocoon-specific) question. Here's the context: We have several hundred thousand time series, but they will, for the foreseeable future, remain in their present repository (the Fame time series database application.) However, there are a few hundred series which our staff use regularly, and which they need to query, graph, plug into reports, save as PDFs, import into spreadsheets, etc. By and large, the Cocoon framework seems like a promising way of providing these multiple views of the data. At this early stage in our planning, we're considering a mechanism whereby these few hundred series are dumped from Fame into XML, one file per time series. We explicitly don't want to dump the data into some intermediate format (e.g, Oracle or whatever), because Fame will remain the core database. So I suppose I was just trying to get a handle on what the preferred methods would be of using web forms to do simple queries on these XML files... other folks mentioned XSLT, which I realize would be one route... but I still don't know enough about JSP, XSP, etc, to know what other mechanisms might be available. - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cocoon in Fortune 500
Had an interesting meeting at work yesterday. We have a team of consultants from, er, a well-known Fortune 500 management-consulting company poking around these days, making recommendations on proposed architectures for integrated publishing, or whatever. Now, I wasn't optimistic that anything useful would come out of this process; it's been my painful experience in the past that consultants of this kind usually end up recommending hugely expensive and grossly inappropriate proprietary solutions... a waste of everyone's time and money. Anyway, so these guys were questioning me about my current publishing architecture, and my plans for the future. At one point I said, I've been experimenting with a platform that you probably haven't heard of, which I like a lot... it's called Cocoon. Well. These guys glanced at one another and smiled, then one of them explained that they too were big Cocoon fans, had in fact developed a large production site using it... so we got along fine after that :) One of the guys made some interesting points about the FUD aspects of recommending an open-source product like Cocoon... noted that his approach was to sneak it in with IBM Websphere; the client is happy because he's 'bought IBM', and I'm happy because Websphere and Cocoon have basically emerged out of the same developer communities, so they integrate tightly. Anyway, sounds like Cocoon is making inroads in the corporate IT world. - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: documentation for managers, was HP-SOAP Server announcement
On 11 Apr 2002 at 10:46, Peter Robins wrote: In principle, Cocoon is of interest, but the key question is: is it worth the effort and the extra overhead of using Java? A very relevant point. I suppose this is an issue facing all of the Jakarta projects, the fact that besides selling open-source solutions (a challenge itself in many organizations), you're also requiring the introduction of a whole new platform. This is problematic for some of my colleagues on this project; they would have to go through lengthy approval processes in their respective organizations before they could consider using Java/Cocoon in production. This is something that Jakarta overall could probably spend a little more time educating users about. What I'm looking for (and don't find in the documentation) is answers to basic management questions like 'what advantages does Cocoon provide, i.e. what business objectives does it help meet and how?' 'how easy is it to implement?' 'what resources (time, skills level of staff) does it require to (a) get up and running (b) maintain?' plus standard operational questions like performance and security. Agreed, though certainly no one can be faulted for this. I was a documentation manager at one time in my, er, varied career, and I know that it's not possible to write comprehensive docs until the product is mature and stable. I do get the feeling that Cocoon is pretty near ready for primetime by now, however. Time to make the business case, as you say. - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: HP-SOAP Server announcement
On 10 Apr 2002 at 15:07, Konstantin Piroumian wrote: This is definitaly a stuff that should be placed on the Cocoon site front page. The more this kind of news - the more popular is Cocoon. We definitely need a volunteer with good writing/advertising skills to create a promotional front page for Cocoon. Well, I'd be happy to do so, once I understand Cocoon a little better. It's difficult to write persuasive copy without an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter; otherwise you just end up writing meaningless marketing drivel. The more I explore and tinker with Cocoon, the more impressed I become. But when I try to explain its capabilities to colleagues, I tend to get bogged down in jargon: Well, it uses pipelined SAX processing to, uh... well... it's pretty cool, anyway. :) My interest in Cocoon arises from my involvement in a project with various central banks throughout the world: we're looking at mechanisms whereby we can exchange press releases, research abstracts and statistical data via XML. And Cocoon seems purpose-built for what we're trying to achieve, at least so far. Especially in its ability to pull data out of numerous non-XML sources. Very slick. The recent charting thread is also of great interest. I do agree with comments in an earlier thread about the need for more detailed docs for Cocoon. My colleagues and I are of similar skill levels: we're managers with IT and communications backgrounds, all of whom do a little coding as required, but we're primarily project leaders. We're not hard-core developers. And I know we do find aspects of Cocoon (and server-side Java in general) a little baffling still. A lot of unfamiliar concepts and procedures to master. (Don't get me started on bloody classpaths!! :) Anyway... put me down as a volunteer to help with beefing up the docs and marketing stuff. - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Greetings, and question
On 4 Apr 2002 at 19:36, Vadim Gritsenko wrote: Test it, and continue from this to next step: map:match pattern=yahoo map:generate type=html src=http://www.yahoo.com; map:parameter name=xpath value=/html/ /map:generate map:serialize type=xml/ /map:match Test it, see the result, go further. Say, use xpath value=/html/body/table. Ah. Should have thought of changing the serializer to xml... this showed me where there were problems in the source document, even after being tidied. Which in turn allowed me to fine-tune the xpath statement. I have it working now, somewhat anyway. (I suspect the page may simply be too complex to pull out *exactly* what I want, but I'm getting closer at least.) Thanks. - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Greetings, and question
Hello all, just getting up to speed on Cocoon, and finding it all quite fascinating. No doubt I'll have many more questions in the coming months. Anyway, today's question is on xpath. I'm trying to customize the HTML Generator 'scraper' example to extract bits from a given HTML page. Now, I have rudimentary knowledge of xpath syntax, but not enough I guess because I'm stuck. Here's a sample of the HTML to be scraped: --- table width=100% border=0 bis t=pr f=p020326.htm tr td nowrap align=right valign=top 26 Mar 2002 nbsp; /td td valign=top Financial Stability Forum holds its seventh meeting (a href=p020326.htmRead/a) /td /tr /bis bis t=pr f=p020318.htm tr td nowrap align=right valign=top [snip] /td /tr /bis Etc. -- The bis... stuff is used by another, non-XML process, but it seemed to me it should be a no-brainer to write an xpath argument that would pull out between the bis /bis and transform them. However, it isn't. Can anyone point me in the right general direction here? - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Greetings, and question
On 4 Apr 2002 at 21:43, Luca Morandini wrote: xsl:template match=bis xsl:element name=biselement xsl:copy-of select=./ /xsl:element /xsl:template But this is plain XSLT matching, nothing to do with XPATH. BTW, I've noticed your HTML is NOT XML-compliant, which will cause problems to XSLT: mind ! OK, I think I follow your drift. As for the HTML... yes, it's pretty rough in that respect. Not my code, mind you :) Thanks, I'll try that route. - Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario http://www.almonte.com http://www.bankofcanada.ca - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faqs.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
