Author: rgardler
Date: Sat Nov 18 03:45:24 2006
New Revision: 476491
URL: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=rev&rev=476491
Log:
Start of a FAQ to help those familiar with Forrest 1 to get to grips with
Forrest 2
Added:
forrest/trunk/whiteboard/forrest2/src/docs/faq/
forrest/trunk/whiteboard/forrest2/src/docs/faq/forrest1-vs-forrest2.html
Added: forrest/trunk/whiteboard/forrest2/src/docs/faq/forrest1-vs-forrest2.html
URL:
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/forrest/trunk/whiteboard/forrest2/src/docs/faq/forrest1-vs-forrest2.html?view=auto&rev=476491
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd";>
+<!--
+ Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
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+ The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
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+
+ http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+
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+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
+<title>Forrest 1 Vs Forrest 2</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+ <p>This document attempts to answer the common questins
+ asked by people familiar with Forrest 1 and trying to
+ understand Forrest 2.</p>
+
+ <h1>Where are the *.xmap files?</h1>
+
+ <p>There aren't any.</p>
+
+ <p>Forrest 2 does not use Cocoon as its underlying
+ framework and so we have been able to do away with
+ our sitemaps.</p>
+
+ <h1>So where is the processing pipeline define?</h1>
+
+ <p>In Forrest 1 the processing pipeline was defined in
+ the cocoon sitemap files. The sitemap language is very
+ powerful, but it is also very confusing for newcomers.
+ Forrest 2 recognises that since Forrest is an XML
+ publishing framework all it needs to do is read an input
+ (or set of inputs), convert them to the Forrest internal
+ format and then process them using relevant output
+ documents. To do this we do not need the complexities of
+ the sitemap.</p>
+
+ <p>The processing pipeline of Forrest 2 is defined in
+ forrestContext.xml. Briefly:</p>
+
+ <p>All pipelines are, essentially, a Reader -> an Input
+ Plugin -> an Output Plugin. This is anologous to Generator
+ -> Transformaer -> Serliazer in Cocoon sitemaps.</p>
+
+ <p>The reader provides the source document, the input
+ plugin converts it into a document Forrest can work with
+ internally, and the output Plugin produces the required
+ output document.</p>
+
+ <p>A client makes a query, such as "http://foo.org/bar.html";.
+ This is mapped to a source document URI using the locationmap
+ (this process is almost identical to that in Forrest 1).
+ This URI will look something like "file:foo/bar.xml" or
+ "http://remote.foo.org/bar.xml";.</p>
+
+ <p>Once we have this source URI we can select a reader to
+ retrieve the document. Readers are selected based on the
+ protocol in the source URI. The protocol corresponds to
+ the bean id in forrestContext.xml.</p>
+
+ <p>So a source of "file://foo/bar.xml" will use the reader
+ identified by <bean id="file"...> in forrestcontext.xml.
+ Similarly, "http://remote.foo.org/bar.xml"; will use the
+ reader identified by <bean id="http"...>.</p>
+
+ <p>The reader produces a document encapsulated in a class
+ that exposes a getType() method. The return value of this
+ method is used to select the input plugin to use. Again
+ selected on the bean id in forrestContext.xml</p>
+
+ <p>Now we have the input plugin we need to get the output
+ plugin. This is selected slightly differently, because
+ each output plugin may be used for many request URI's. For
+ example, both "html" and "htm" extensions may indicate
+ that an HTML document is required.</p>
+
+ <p>In order to select the output plugin each plugin bean
+ defines a "pattern property. This property is a Regular
+ Expresion that is used to match against the original client
+ request URI. The first output plugin that is discovered is
+ the one that is used.</p>
+
+
+
+</body>
+</html>
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